Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Andrew Templeton, Josephine
Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net.
A HISTORY
OF
NINETEENTH CENTURY
LITERATURE
(1780-1895)
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
EDINBURGH
_New York_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1906
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1896,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped, January, 1896. Reprinted October,
1896; August, 1898; September, 1899; April, 1902; March, 1904;
November, 1906.
_Norwood Press_
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
In the execution of the present task (which I took over about two years
ago from hands worthier than mine, but then more occupied) some
difficulties of necessity occurred which did not present themselves to
myself when I undertook the volume of Elizabethan Literature, or to my
immediate predecessor in grappling with the period between 1660 and
1780.
The most obvious and serious of these was the question, "What should be
done with living authors?" Independently of certain perils of selection
and exclusion, of proportion and of freedom of speech, I believe it will
be recognised by every one who has ever attempted it, that to mix
estimates of work which is done and of work which is unfinished is to
the last degree unsatisfactory. I therefore resolved to include no
living writer, except Mr. Ruskin, in this volume for the purpose of
detailed criticism, though some may be now and then mentioned in
passing.
Even with this limitation the task remained a rather formidable one.
Those who are least disposed to overvalue literary work in proportion as
it approaches their own time will still acknowledge that the last
hundred and fifteen years are fuller furnished than either of the
periods of not very dissimilar length which have been already dealt
with. The proportion of names of the first, or of a very high second
class, is distinctly larger than in the eighteenth century; the bulk of
literary production is infinitely greater than in the Elizabethan time.
Further, save in regard to the earliest subsections of this period, Time
has not performed his office, beneficent to the reader but more
beneficent to the historian, of sifting and riddling out writers whom it
is no longer necessary to consider, save in a spirit of adventurous or
affectionate antiquarianism. I must ask the reader to believe me when I
say that many who do not appear here at all, or who are dismissed in a
few lines, have yet been the subjects of careful reading on my part. If
some exclusions (not due to mere oversight) appear arbitrary or unjust,
I would urge that this is not a Dictionary of Authors, nor a Catalogue
of Books, but a History of Literature; and that to mention everybody is
as impossible as to say everything. As I have revised the sheets the old
query has recurred to myself only too often, and sometimes in reference
to very favourite books and authors of my own. Where, it may be asked,
is Kenelm Digby and the _Broad Stone of Honour_? Where Sir Richard
Burton (as great a contrast to Digby as can well be imagined)? Where
Laurence Oliphant, who, but the other day, seemed to many clever men the
cleverest man they knew? Where John Foster, who provided food for the
thoughtful public two generations ago? Where Greville of the caustic
diaries, and his editor (latest deceased) Mr. Reeve, and Crabb Robinson,
and many others? Some of these and others are really _neiges d'antan_;
some baffle the historian in miniature by being rebels to brief and
exact characterisation; some, nay many, are simply crowded out.
I must also ask pardon for having exercised apparently arbitrary
discretion in alternately separating the work of the same writer under
different chapter-headings, and grouping it with a certain disregard of
the strict limits of the chapter-heading itself. I think I shall obtain
this pardon from those who remember the advantage obtainable from a
connected view of the progress of distinct literary kinds, and that,
sometimes not to be foregone, of considering the whole work of certain
writers together.
To provide room for the greater press of material, it was necessary to
make some slight changes of omission in the scheme of the earlier
volumes. The opportunity of considerable gain was suggested in the
department of extract--which obviously became less necessary in the case
of authors many of whom are familiar, and hardly any accessible with
real difficulty. Nor did it seem necessary to take up room with the
bibliographical index, the utility of which in my Elizabethan volume I
was glad to find almost universally recognised. This would have had to
be greatly more voluminous here; and it was much less necessary. With a
very few exceptions, all the writers here included are either kept in
print, or can be obtained without much trouble at the second-hand
bookshops.
To what has thus been said as to the principles of arrangement it cannot
be necessary to add very much as to the principles of criticism. They
are the same as those which I have always endeavoured to maintain--that
is to say, I have attempted to preserve a perfectly independent, and, as
far as possible, a rationally uniform judgment, taking account of none
but literary characteristics, but taking account of all characteristics
that are literary. It may be, and it probably is, more and more
difficult to take achromatic views of literature as it becomes more and
more modern; it is certainly more difficult to get this achromatic
character, even where it exists, acknowledged by contemporaries. But it
has at least been my constant effort to attain it.
In the circumstances, and with a view to avoid not merely repetition but
confusion and dislocation in the body of the book, I have thought it
better to make the concluding chapter one of considerably greater length
than the corresponding part of the Elizabethan volume, and to reserve
for it the greater part of what may be called connecting and
comprehensive criticism. In this will be found what may be not
improperly described from one point of view as the opening of the case,
and from another as its summing up--the evidence which justifies both
being contained in the earlier chapters.
It is perhaps not improper to add that the completion of this book has
been made a little difficult by the incidence of new duties, not in
themselves unconnected with its subject. But I have done my best to
prevent or supply oversight.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
PAGE
The Starting-point--Cowper--Crabbe--Blake--Burns--Minor
Poets--The Political Satirists--Gifford--Mathias--Dr. Moore,
etc.--Paine--Godwin--Holcroft--Beckford, etc.--Mrs.
Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis--Hannah More--Gilpin 1
CHAPTER II
THE NEW POETRY
Wordsworth--Coleridge--Southey--Scott--Byron--Shelley--Keats--
Rogers--Campbell--Moore--Leigh Hunt--Hogg--Landor--Minor
Poets born before Tennyson--Beddoes--Sir Henry Taylor--Mrs.
Hemans and L, E. L.--Hood and Praed 49
CHAPTER III
THE NEW FICTION
Interval--Maturin--Miss Edgeworth--Miss Austen--The _Waverley
Novels_--Hook--Bulwer--Dickens--Thackeray--Marryat--Lever--Minor
Naval Novelists--Disraeli--Peacock--Borrow--Miss
Martineau--Miss Mitford 125
CHAPTER IV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS.
New Periodicals at the beginning of the
Century--Cobbett--The _Edinburgh Review_--Jeffrey--Sydney
Smith--The _Quarterly_--_Blackwood's_ and the _London
Magazines_--Lamb--Hazlitt--Wilson--Lockhart--De
Quincey--Leigh Hunt--Hartley Coleridge--Maginn and
_Fraser_--Sterling and the Sterling Club--Edward
FitzGerald--Barham 166
CHAPTER V
THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY
Occasional
Historians--Hallam--Roscoe--Mitford--Lingard--Turner--
Palgrave--The Tytlers--Alison--Milman--Grote and
Thirlwall--Arnold--Macaulay--Carlyle--Minor
Figures--Buckle--Kinglake--Freeman and Green--Froude 211
CHAPTER VI
THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD
Tennyson--Mr. and Mrs. Browning--Matthew Arnold--The
Prae-Raphaelite Movement--Rossetti--Miss
Rossetti--O'Shaughnessy--Thomson--Minor Poets--Lord
Houghton--Aytoun--The Spasmodics--Minor
Poets--Clough--Locker--The Earl of Lytton--Humorous
Verse-Writers--Poetesses 253
CHAPTER VII
THE NOVEL SINCE 1850
Changes in the Novel--Miss Bronte--George Eliot--Charles
Kingsley--The Trollopes--Reade--Minor Novelists--Stevenson 317
CHAPTER VIII
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
Limits of this and following Chapters--Bentham--
Mackintosh--The Mills--Hamilton and the Hamiltonians--
Mansel--Other Philosophers--Jurisprudents:
Austin, Maine, Stephen--Political Economists and
Malthus--The Oxford Movement--Pusey--Keble--Newman--The
Scottish Disruption--Chalmers--Irving--Other
Divines--Maurice--Robertson 342
CHAPTER IX
LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS
Changes in Periodicals--The _Saturday Review_--Critics of
the middle of the Century--Helps--Matthew Arnold in
Prose--Mr. Ruskin--Jefferies--Pater--Symonds--Minto 378
CHAPTER X
SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE
Increasing Difficulty of
Selection--Porson--Conington--Munro--Sellar--Robertson
Smith--Davy--Mrs. Somerville--Other Scientific Writers--
Darwin--_Vestiges of Creation_--Hugh Miller--Huxley 404
CHAPTER XI
DRAMA
Weakness of this department throughout--O'Keefe--Joanna
Baillie--Knowles--Bulwer--Planche 417
CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION
Survey and Analysis of the Period in the several
divisions--Revolutions in Style--The present state of
Literature 425
INDEX 471
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The period of English literary history which is dealt with in the
opening part of the present volume includes, of necessity, among its
most illustrious names, not a few whose work will not be the subject of
formal discussion here, because the major part of it was done within the
scope of the volume which preceded. Thus, to mention only one of these
names, the most splendid displays of Burke's power--the efforts in which
he at last gave to mankind what had previously been too often devoted to
party--date from this time, and even from the later part of it; while
Gibbon did not die till 1794, and Horace Walpole not till 1797. Even
Johnson, the type and dictator at once of the eighteenth century in
literary England, survived the date of 1780 by four years.
Nevertheless the beginning of the ninth decade of the century did
actually correspond with a real change, a real line of demarcation. Not
only did the old writers drop off one by one, not only did no new
writers of utterly distinct idiosyncrasy (Burns and Blake excepted) make
their appearance till quite the end of it, but it was also marked by the
appearance of men of letters and of literary styles which announced, if
not very distinctly, the coming of changes of the most sweeping kind.
Hard as it may be to exhibit the exact contrast between, say, Goldsmith
and men like Cowper on the one side and Crabbe on the other, that
contrast cannot but be felt by every reader who has used himself in the
very least to the consideration of literary differences. And as with
individuals, so with kinds. No special production of these twenty years
may be of the highest value; but there is a certain idiosyncrasy, if
only an idiosyncrasy of transition--an unlikeness to anything that comes
before, and to anything, unless directly imitated, that comes
after--which is equally distinguishable in the curious succession of
poetical satires from Peter Pindar to the _Anti-Jacobin_, in the
terror-and-mystery novels of the school of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk
Lewis, in the large, if not from the literary point of view extremely
noteworthy, department of politics and economics which in various ways
employed the pens of writers so different as Moore, Young, Godwin,
Priestley, Horne, Tooke, Cobbett, and Paine.
Giving poetry, as usual, the precedence even in the most unpoetical
periods, we shall find in the four names already cited--those of Crabbe,
Cowper, Blake, and Burns--examples of which even the most poetical
period need not be ashamed. In what may be called the absolute spirit of
poetry, the _nescio quid_ which makes the greatest poets, no one has
ever surpassed Burns and Blake at their best; though the perfection of
Burns is limited in kind, and the perfection of Blake still more limited
in duration and sustained force. Cowper would have been a great poet of
the second class at any time, and in some times might have attained the
first. As for Crabbe, he very seldom has the absolute spirit of poetry
just mentioned; but the vigour and the distinction of his verse, as well
as his wonderful faculty of observation in rendering scene and
character, are undeniable. And it is not perhaps childish to point out
that there is something odd and out of the way about the poetical career
of all these poets of the transition. Cowper's terrible malady postpones
his first efforts in song to an age when most poets are losing their
voices; Crabbe, beginning brilliantly and popularly, relapses into a
silence of nearly a quarter of a century before breaking out with
greater power and skill than ever; Burns runs one of the shortest, if
one of the most brilliant, Blake one of the longest, the strangest, the
most intermittent, of poetical careers. Nor is it superfluous to draw
attention further to the fact that when we leave this little company--at
the best august, at the worst more than respectable--we drop suddenly to
the flattest and most hopeless bog of poesiless verse that lies anywhere
on the map of England's literature. Passing from the ethereal music of
the Scottish ploughman and the English painter, from Cowper's noble or
gentle thought and his accomplished versification, from Crabbe's manly
vigour and his Rembrandt touch, we find nothing, unless it be the
ingenious but not strictly poetical burlesque of the Wolcots and the
Lawrences, till we come to the drivel of Hayley and the drought of
Darwin.
Of the quartette, William Cowper was by far the oldest; the other three
being contemporaries within a few years. He was born on 26th November
1731 at Great Berkhampstead. His father was a clergyman and a royal
chaplain, his mother one of the Norfolk Donnes. Her early death, and
that school discomfort which afterwards found vent in _Tirocinium_,
appear to have aggravated a natural melancholia; though after leaving
Westminster, and during his normal studies at both branches of the law,
he seems to have been cheerful enough. How what should have been the
making of his fortune,--his appointment as Clerk of the Journals to the
House of Lords,--not unassisted by religious mania, drove him through
sheer nervousness to attempt suicide, is one of the best known things in
English literary biography, as indeed are most of the few events of his
sad life,--owing partly to his own charming letters, partly to the
biographies of Southey and others. His latest days were his unhappiest,
and after years of more or less complete loss of reason he died on 27th
April 1800.
It has been said that Cowper did not take to writing till late in life.
He had had literary friends--Churchill, Lloyd, and others--in youth, and
must always have had literary sympathies; but it was not till he was
nearly fifty, nor till the greater part of twenty years after his first
mental seizure, that he attempted composition at the instance of his
friend Newton and the Unwins. Beginning with hymns and trifles, he
before long undertook, at this or that person's suggestion, longer
poems, such as _Truth_, _The Progress of Error_, and _Expostulation_,
which were finished by 1781 and published next year, to be followed by
the still better and more famous _Task_, suggested to him by Lady
Austen. This appeared in 1785, and was very popular. He had already
begun to translate Homer, which occupied him for the greater part of
seven years. Nothing perhaps settled him more in the public affections
than "John Gilpin," the subject of which he also owed to Lady Austen;
and he continued to write occasional pieces of exquisite accomplishment.
Almost the last, if not actually the last, of these, written just before
the final obscuration of his faculties, was the beautiful and terrible
"Castaway," an avowed allegory of his own condition.
Cowper, even more than most writers, deserves and requites consideration
under the double aspect of matter and form. In both he did much to alter
the generally accepted conditions of English poetry; and if his formal
services have perhaps received less attention than they merit, his
material achievements have never been denied. His disposition--in which,
by a common enough contrast, the blackest and most hopeless melancholy
was accompanied by the merriest and most playful humour--reflected
itself unequally in his verse, the lighter side chiefly being exhibited.
Except in "The Castaway," and a few--not many--of the hymns, Cowper is
the very reverse of a gloomy poet. His amiability, however, could also
pass into very strong moral indignation, and he endeavoured to give
voice to this in a somewhat novel kind of satire, more serious and
earnest than that of Pope, much less political and personal than that of
Dryden, lighter and more restrained than that of the Elizabethans. His
own unworldly disposition, together with the excessively retired life
which he had led since early manhood, rather damaged the chances of
Cowper as a satirist. We always feel that his censure wants actuality,
that it is an exercise rather than an experience. His efforts in it,
however, no doubt assisted, and were assisted by, that alteration of
the fashionable Popian couplet which, after the example partly of
Churchill and with a considerable return to Dryden, he attempted, made
popular, and handed on to the next generation to dis-Pope yet further.
This couplet, paralleled by a not wholly dissimilar refashioning of
blank verse, in which, though not deserting Milton, he beat out for
himself a scheme quite different from Thomson's, perhaps show at their
best in the descriptive matter of _The Task_ and similar poems. It was
in these that Cowper chiefly displayed that faculty of "bringing back
the eye to the object" and the object to the eye, in which he has been
commonly and justly thought to be the great English restorer. Long
before the end of the Elizabethan period, poetical observation of nature
had ceased to be just; and, after substituting for justness the wildest
eccentricities of conceit, it went for a long time into another
extreme--that of copying and recopying certain academic
conventionalities, instead of even attempting the natural model. It is
not true, as Wordsworth and others have said, that Dryden himself could
not draw from the life. He could and did; but his genius was not
specially attracted to such drawing, his subjects did not usually call
for it, and his readers did not want it. It is not true that Thomson
could not "see"; nor is it true of all his contemporaries and immediate
followers that they were blind. But the eighteenth century had slipped
into a fault which was at least as fatal as that of the
Idealist-Impressionists of the seventeenth, or as that of the
Realist-Impressionists of our own time. The former neglected
universality in their hunt after personal conceits; the latter neglect
it in the endeavour to add nothing to rigidly elaborated personal
sensation. The one kind outstrips nature; the other comes short of art.
From Dryden to Cowper the fault was different from both of these. It
neglected the personal impression and the attention to nature too much.
It dared not present either without stewing them in a sauce of stock
ideas, stock conventions, stock words and phrases, which equally missed
the universal and the particular. Cowper and the other great men who
were his contemporaries by publication if not by birth, set to work to
cure this fault. Even the weakest of them could never have been guilty
of such a passage as that famous one which Congreve (as clever a man as
any) wrote, and which Johnson (as clever a man as any) admired. The
sentiment which actuated them was, if we may trust Coleridge's account
of Boyer or Bowyer, the famous tyrant of Christ's Hospital, well
diffused. "'Nymph,' boy? You mean your nurse's daughter," puts in a
somewhat brutal and narrow form the correction which the time needed,
and which these four in their different ways applied.
We have already glanced at the way in which Cowper applied it in his
larger poems: he did it equally well, and perhaps more tellingly, in his
smaller. The day on which a poet of no mean pretensions, one belonging
altogether to the upper classes of English society, and one whose lack
of university education mattered the less because the universities were
just then at their nadir, dared to write of the snake he killed
"And taught him never to come there no more"
was an epoch-making day. Swift would have done it; but Swift was in many
ways a voice crying in the wilderness, and Swift was not, strictly
speaking, a poet at all. Byrom would have done it; but Byrom was
emphatically a minor poet. Cowper could--at least in and for his
day--boast the major afflatus, and Cowper did not disdain vernacular
truth. He never could have been vulgar; there is not in the whole range
of English literature quite such a gentleman in his own way as Cowper.
But he has escaped almost entirely from the genteel style--from the
notion of things as below the dignity of literature.
His prose in this respect is at least equal to his verse, though, as it
was known much later, it has greater tendency than influence. All good
critics have agreed that his letters are not surpassed, perhaps not
surpassable. He has more freedom than Gray; he has none of the coxcombry
of Walpole and Byron; and there is no fifth name that can be put even
into competition with him. Ease, correctness, facility of expression,
freedom from convention within his range, harmony, truth to nature,
truth to art:--these things meet in the hapless recluse of Olney as they
had not met for a century--perhaps as they had never met--in English
epistles. The one thing that he wanted was strength: as his madness was
melancholy, not raving, so was his sanity mild but not triumphant.
George Crabbe was three and twenty years younger than Cowper, having
been born on Christmas Eve 1754. But his first publication, _The
Library_, the success of which was due to the generous and quick-sighted
patronage of Burke after the poet had wrestled with a hard youth,
coincided almost exactly with the first appearance of Cowper, and indeed
a little anticipated it. _The Village_ appeared in 1783, and _The
Newspaper_ in 1785, and then Crabbe (who had taken orders, had been
instituted to livings in the East of England, and had married, after a
long engagement, his first love) was silent for two and twenty years. He
began again in 1807 with _The Parish Register_. _The Borough_, his
greatest work, appeared in 1810. Shifting from the East of England to
the West in 1813, he spent the last twenty years of his long life at
Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and died in 1832 at the age of seventy-eight.
The external (and, as will be presently remarked, something more than
the external) uniformity of his work is great, and its external
conformity to the traditions and expectations of the time at which it
first appeared is almost greater. A hasty judgment, and even one which,
though not hasty, is not very keen-sighted, might see little difference
between Crabbe and any poet from Pope to Goldsmith except the
innovators. He is all but constant to the heroic couplet--the Spenserian
introduction to _The Birth of Flattery_, the variously-grouped
octosyllabic quatrains of _Reflections_, _Sir Eustace Grey_, _The Hall
of Justice_, and _Woman_, with a few other deviations, being merely
islets among a wide sea of rhymed decasyllabics constituting at least
nineteen-twentieths of the poet's outpouring. Moreover, he was as a rule
constant, not merely to the couplet, but to what has been called the
"shut" couplet--the couplet more or less rigidly confined to itself,
and not overlapping. But he did sometimes overlap, and either in fealty
to Dryden, or from a secret feeling of the craving for freedom which his
more lawless contemporaries expressed in other ways, he reverted to the
Drydenian triplet and Alexandrine on which Pope had frowned. In Crabbe's
couplet, too, there is something which distinguishes it from almost all
others. This something varies very much in appeal. It is sometimes, nay,
too often, a rather ludicrous something, possessing a sort of awkward
prosaic "flop," which is excellently caricatured in _Rejected
Addresses_. But it always shows signs of a desire to throw the emphasis
with more variation than the icy uniformity of the Popian cadence
admitted; and it is sometimes curiously effective.
Crabbe's position, independently of the strange gap in his publication
(which has been variously accounted for), is not a little singular. The
greater and the better part of his work was composed when the Romantic
revival was in full swing, but it shows little or no trace of the
influence of that revival in versification or diction. His earliest
attempts do indeed show the same reaction from Pope to Dryden (of whom
we know that he was an eager student) which is visible in Cowper and
Churchill; and throughout his work, both earlier and later, there is a
ruthless discarding of conventional imagery and a stern attention to the
realities of scenery and character. But Crabbe has none of the Grace of
the new dispensation, if he has some glimpses of its Law. He sails so
close to the wind of poetry that he is sometimes merely prosaic and
often nearly so. His conception of life is anti-idealist almost to
pessimism, and he has no fancy. The "jewels five words long" are not
his: indeed there clung to him a certain obscurity of expression which
Johnson is said to have good-naturedly smoothed out in his first work to
some extent, but from which he never got quite free. The extravagances
as well as the graces of the new poetry were quite alien from him; its
exotic tastes touched him not; its love for antiquity (though he knew
old English poetry by no means ill) seems to have left him wholly cold.
The anxieties and sufferings of lower and middle-class life, the
"natural death of love" (which, there seems some reason to fear, he had
experienced), the common English country scenery and society of his
time--these were his subjects, and he dealt with them in a fashion the
mastery of which is to this day a joy to all competent readers. No
writer of his time had an influence which so made for truth pure and
simple, yet not untouched by the necessary "disprosing" processes of
art. For Crabbe is not a mere realist; and whoso considers him as such
has not apprehended him. But he was a realist to this extent, that he
always went to the model and never to the pattern-drawing on the Academy
walls. And that was what his time needed. His general characteristics
are extremely uniform: even the external shape and internal
subject-matter of his poems are almost confined to the shape and matter
of the verse-tale. He need not, and indeed cannot, in a book like this,
be dealt with at much length. But he is a very great writer, and a most
important figure at this turning-point of English literature.
Yet, however one may sympathise with Cowper, however much one may admire
Crabbe, it is difficult for any true lover of poetry not to feel the
sense of a "Pisgah sight," and something more, of the promised land of
poetry, in passing from these writers to William Blake and Robert Burns.
Here there is no more allowance necessary, except in the first case for
imperfection of accomplishment, in the second for shortness of life and
comparative narrowness of range. The quality and opportuneness of poetry
are in each case undeniable. Since the deaths of Herrick and Vaughan,
England had not seen any one who had the finer lyrical gifts of the poet
as Blake had them. Since the death of Dunbar, Scotland had not seen such
strength and intensity of poetic genius (joined in this case to a gift
of melody which Dunbar never had) as were shown by Burns. There was
scarcely more than a twelvemonth between their births; for Blake was
born in 1757 (the day appears not to be known), and Burns in January
1759. But Blake long outlived Burns, and did not die till 1828, while
Burns was no more in July 1796. Neither the long life nor the short one
provided any events which demand chronicling here. Both poets were
rather fortunate in their wives, though Blake clave to Catherine Boucher
more constantly than Burns to his Jean. Neither was well provided with
this world's goods; Burns wearing out his short life in difficulties as
farmer and as excise-man, while all the piety of biographers has left it
something of a mystery how Blake got through his long life with no
better resources than a few very poorly paid private commissions for his
works of design, the sale of his hand-made books of poetry and prophecy,
and such occasional employment in engraving as his unconventional style
and his still more unconventional habits and temper allowed him to
accept or to keep. In some respects the two were different enough
according to commonplace standards, less so perhaps according to others.
The forty years of Burns, and the more than seventy of Blake, were
equally passed in a rapture; but morality has less quarrel with Blake,
who was essentially a "God-intoxicated man" and spent his life in one
long dream of art and prophecy, than with Burns, who was generally in
love, and not unfrequently in liquor. But we need no more either of
antithesis or of comparison: the purely literary matter calls us.
It was in 1783--a date which, in its close approximation to the first
appearances of Crabbe and Cowper, makes the literary student think of
another group of first appearances in the early "eighties" of the
sixteenth century foreshadowing the outburst of Elizabethan
literature--that Blake's first book appeared. His _Poetical Sketches_,
now one of the rarest volumes of English poetry, was printed by
subscription among a literary coterie who met at the house of Mr. and
Mrs. Mathew; but the whole edition was given to the author. He had
avowedly taken little or no trouble to correct it, and the text is
nearly as corrupt as that of the _Supplices_; nor does it seem that he
took any trouble to make it "go off," nor that it did go off in any
appreciable manner. Yet if many ears had then been open to true poetical
music, some of them could not have mistaken sounds the like of which
had not, as has been said, been heard since the deaths of Herrick and
Vaughan. The merit of the contents is unequal to a degree not to be
accounted for by the mere neglect to prepare carefully for press, and
the influence of _Ossian_ is, as throughout Blake's work, much more
prominent for evil than for good. But the chaotic play of _Edward the
Third_ is not mere Elizabethan imitation; and at least half a dozen of
the songs and lyrical pieces are of the most exquisite quality--snatches
of Shakespeare or Fletcher as Shakespeare or Fletcher might have written
them in Blake's time. The finest of all no doubt is the magnificent "Mad
Song." But others--"How sweet I roamed from Field to Field" (the most
eighteenth century in manner, but showing how even that manner could be
strengthened and sweetened); "My Silks and Fine Array," beautiful, but
more like an Elizabethan imitation than most; "Memory Hither Come," a
piece of ineffable melody--these are things which at once showed Blake
to be free of the very first company of poets, to be a poet who for real
essence of poetry excelled everything the century had yet seen, and
everything, with the solitary exception of the _Lyrical Ballads_ at its
extreme end, that it was to see.
Unfortunately it was not by any means as a poet that Blake regarded
himself. He knew that he was an artist, and he thought that he was a
prophet; and for the rest of his life, deviating only now and then into
engraving as a mere breadwinner, he devoted himself to the joint
cultivation of these two gifts, inventing for the purpose a method or
vehicle of publication excellently suited to his genius, but in other
respects hardly convenient. This method was to execute text and
illustrations at once on copper-plates, which were then treated in
slightly different fashions. Impressions worked off from these by
hand-press were coloured by hand, Blake and his wife executing the
entire process. In this fashion were produced the lovely little gems of
literature and design called _Songs of Innocence_ (1789) and _Songs of
Experience_ (1794); in this way for the most part, but with some
modifications, the vast and formidable mass of the so-called
"Prophetic" Books. With the artistic qualities of Blake we are not here
concerned, but it is permissible to remark that they resemble his
literary qualities with a closeness which at once explains and is
explained by their strangely combined method of production. That Blake
was not entirely sane has never been doubted except by a few fanatics of
mysticism, who seem to think that the denial of complete sanity implies
a complete denial of genius. And though he was never, in the common
phrase, "incapable of managing" such very modest affairs as were his,
the defect appears most in the obstinate fashion in which he refused to
perfect and co-ordinate his work. He could, when he chose and would give
himself the trouble, draw quite exquisitely; and he always drew with
marvellous vigour and imagination. But he would often permit himself
faults of drawing quite inexplicable and not very tolerable. So, too,
though he had the finest gift of literary expression, he chose often to
babble and still oftener to rant at large. Even the _Songs of Innocence
and Experience_--despite their double charm to the eye and the ear, and
the presence of such things as the famous "Tiger," as the two
"Introductions" (two of Blake's best things), and as "The Little Girl
Lost"--show a certain poetical declension from the highest heights of
the _Poetical Sketches_. The poet is no longer a poet pure and simple;
he has got purposes and messages, and these partly strangle and partly
render turbid the clear and spontaneous jets of poetry which refresh us
in the "Mad Song" and the "Memory." And after the _Songs_ Blake did not
care to put forth anything bearing the ordinary form of poetry. We
possess indeed other poetical work of his, recovered in scraps and
fragments from MSS., and some of it is beautiful. But it is as a rule
more chaotic than the _Sketches_ themselves; it is sometimes defaced
(being indeed mere private jottings never intended for print) by
personality and coarseness; and it is constantly puddled with the jargon
of Blake's mystical philosophy, which, borrowing some of its method from
Swedenborg and much of its imagery and nomenclature from _Ossian_,
spreads itself unhampered by any form whatever over the Prophetic
Books. The literary merit of these in parts is often very high, and
their theosophy (for that is the best single word for it) is not seldom
majestic. But despite the attempts of some disciples to evolve a regular
system from them, students of philosophy as well as of literature are
never likely to be at much odds as to their real character. "Ravings"
they are not, and they are very often the reverse of "nonsense." But
they are the work of a man who in the first place was very slightly
acquainted with the literature and antecedents of his subject, who in
the second was distinctly _non compos_ on the critical, though admirably
gifted on the creative side of his brain, and who in the third had the
ill luck to fall under the fullest sway of the Ossianic influence. To
any one who loves and admires Blake--and the present writer deliberately
ranks him as the greatest and most delectable poet of the eighteenth
century proper in England, reserving Burns as specially Scotch--it must
always be tempting to say more of him than can be allowed on such a
scale as the present; but the scale must be observed.
There is all the more reason for the observance that Blake exercised on
the literary _history_ of his time no influence, and occupied in it no
position. He always had a few faithful friends and patrons who kept him
from starvation by their commissions, admired him, believed in him, and
did him such good turns as his intensely independent and rather
irritable disposition would allow. But the public had little opportunity
of seeing his pictures, and less of reading his books; and though the
admiration of Lamb led to some appreciation from Southey and others, he
was practically an unread man. This cannot be said of Robert Burns, who,
born as was said a year or two after Blake, made his first literary
venture three years after him, in 1786. Most people know that the
publication, now famous and costly, called "the Kilmarnock Edition," was
originally issued in the main hope of paying the poet's passage to
Jamaica after an unfortunate youth of struggle, and latterly of
dissipation. Nay, even after the appearance of the _Poems_ and their
welcome he still proposed to go abroad. He was summoned back to
Edinburgh to reprint them, to make a considerable profit by them, and to
be lionised without stint by the society of the Scottish capital. He
then settled down, marrying Jean Armour, at Ellisland in Dumfriesshire,
on a small farm and a post in the Excise, which, when his farming failed
and he moved to Dumfries itself, became his only regular means of
support. He might have increased this considerably by literature; but as
it was he actually gave away, or disposed of for trifling equivalents,
most of the exquisite songs which he wrote in his later years. These
years were unhappy. He hailed the French Revolution with a perfectly
innocent, because obviously ignorant, Jacobinism which, putting all
other considerations aside, was clearly improper in a salaried official
of the Crown, and thereby got into disgrace with the authorities, and
also with society in and about Dumfries. His habits of living, though
their recklessness has been vastly exaggerated, were not careful, and
helped to injure both his reputation and his health. Before long he
broke down completely, and died on the first of July 1796, his poetical
powers being to the very last in fullest perfection.
Burns' work, which even in bulk--its least remarkable characteristic--is
very considerable when his short life and his unfavourable education and
circumstances are reckoned, falls at once into three sharply contrasted
sections. There are his poems in Scots; there are the verses that, in
obedience partly to the incompetent criticism of his time, partly to a
very natural mistake of ambition and ignorance, he tried to write in
conventional literary English; and there is his prose, taking the form
of more or less studied letters. The second class of the poems is almost
worthless, and fortunately it is not bulky. The letters are of unequal
value, and have been variously estimated. They show indeed that, like
almost all poets, he might, if choice and fate had united, have become a
very considerable prose-writer, and they have immense autobiographic
value. But they are sometimes, and perhaps often, written as much in
falsetto as the division of verse just ruled out; their artificiality
does not take very good models; and their literary attraction is
altogether second-rate. How far different the value of the Scots poems
is, four generations have on the whole securely agreed. The moral
discomfort of Principal Shairp, the academic distaste of Mr. Matthew
Arnold for a world of "Scotch wit, Scotch religion, and Scotch drink,"
and the purely indolent and ignorant reluctance of others to grapple
with Scottish dialect, need not trouble the catholic critic much. The
two first may be of some use as cautions and drags; the third may be
thrown aside at once. Scots, though a dialect, is not a patois; it has a
great and continuous literature; it combines in an extraordinary degree
the consonant virtues of English and the vowel range of the Latin
tongues. It is true that Burns' range of subject, as distinct from that
of sound, was not extremely wide. He could give a voice to
passion--passion of war, passion of conviviality, passion above all of
love--as none but the very greatest poets ever have given or will give
it; he had also an extraordinary command of _genre_-painting of all
kinds, ranging from the merely descriptive and observant to the most
intensely satirical. Perhaps he could only do these two things--could
not be (as he certainly has not been) philosophical, deeply meditative,
elaborately in command of the great possibilities of nature, political,
moral, argumentative. But what an "only" have we here! It amounts to
this, that Burns could "only" seize, could "only" convey the charms of
poetical expression to, the more primitive thought and feeling of the
natural man, and that he could do this supremely. His ideas are--to use
the rough old Lockian division--ideas of sensation, not of reflection;
and when he goes beyond them he is sensible, healthy, respectable, but
not deep or high. In his own range there are few depths or heights to
which he has not soared or plunged.
That he owed a good deal to his own Scottish predecessors, especially to
Ferguson, is not now denied; and his methods of composing his songs are
very different from those which a lesser man, using more academic forms,
could venture upon without the certainty of the charge of plagiarism. We
shall never understand Burns aright if we do not grasp the fact that he
was a "folk-poet," into whom the soul of a poet of all time and all
space had entered. In all times and countries where folk-poetry has a
genuine existence, its forms and expressions are much less the property
of the individual than of the race. The business of collecting ballads
is one of the most difficult and doubtful, not to say dangerous, open to
the amateur. But it is certain that any collector who was not a mere
simpleton would at once reject as spurious a version which he heard in
identically the same terms from two different subjects. He would know
that they must have got it from a printed or at least written source.
Now Burns is, if not our only example, our only example of the very
first quality, of the poet who takes existing work and hands it on
shaped to his own fashion. Not that he was not perfectly competent to do
without any existing canvas; while, when he had it, he treated it
without the very slightest punctilio. Of some of the songs which he
reshaped into masterpieces for Johnson and Thomson he took no more than
the air and measure; of others only the refrain or the first few lines;
of others again stanzas or parts of stanzas. But everywhere he has
stamped the version with something of his own--something thenceforward
inseparable from it, and yet characteristic of him. In the expression of
the triumph and despair of love, not sicklied over with any thought as
in most modern poets, only Catullus and Sappho can touch Burns. "Green
grow the Rashes O," "Yestreen I had a Pint of Wine," the farewell to
Clarinda, and the famous death-bed verses to Jessie Lewars, make any
advance on them impossible in point of spontaneous and unreflecting
emotion; while a thousand others (the number is hardly rhetorical) come
but little behind. "Willie brew'd a Peck o' Maut" in the same way rides
sovereign at the head of a troop of Bacchanalian verses; and the touches
of rhetoric and convention in "Scots wha hae" cannot spoil, can hardly
even injure it. To some it really seems that the much praised lines "To
Mary in Heaven" and others where the mood is less boisterous, show Burns
at less advantage, not because the kind is inferior, but because he was
less at home in it; but it is almost impossible to praise too highly the
equally famous "Mouse," and some other things. It was in this tremendous
force of natural passion and affection, and in his simple observation of
common things, that Burns' great lesson for his age and country lay.
None even of the reformers had dared to be passionate as yet. In Cowper
indeed there was no passion except of religious despair, in Crabbe none
except that of a grim contemplation of the miseries and disappointments
of life, while although there was plenty of passion in Blake it had all
conveyed itself into the channel of mystical dreaming. It is a little
pathetic, and more than a little curious, to compare "The Star that
shines on Anna's Breast," the one approach to passionate expression of
Cowper's one decided love, with any one of a hundred outbursts of Burns,
sometimes to the very same name.
The other division of the Poems, at the head of which stand _The Jolly
Beggars_, _Tam o' Shanter_, and _The Holy Fair_, exhibit an equal power
of vivid feeling and expression with a greater creative and observant
faculty, and were almost equally important as a corrective and
alterative to their generation. The age was not ill either at drama, at
manners-painting, or at satire; but the special kind of dramatic,
pictorial, and satiric presentation which Burns manifested was quite
unfamiliar to it and in direct contradiction to its habits and
crotchets. It had had a tendency to look only at upper and middle-class
life, to be conventional in its very indecorum, to be ironic, indirect,
parabolical. It admired the Dutch painters, it had dabbled in the
occult, it was Voltairian enough; but it had never dared to outvie
Teniers and Steen as in _The Jolly Beggars_, to blend naturalism and
_diablerie_ with the overwhelming _verve_ of _Tam o' Shanter_, to change
the jejune freethinking of two generations into an outspoken and
particular attack on personal hypocrisy in religion as in _Holy Willie's
Prayer_ and _The Holy Fair_. Even to Scotsmen, we may suspect (or rather
we pretty well know, from the way in which Robertson and Blair, Hume and
Mackenzie, write), this burst of genial racy humour from the _terrae
filius_ of Kilmarnock must have been somewhat startling; and it speaks
volumes for the amiable author of the _Man of Feeling_ that, in the very
periodical where he was wont to air his mild Addisonian hobbies, he
should have warmly commended the Ayrshire ploughman.
In a period where we have so many great or almost great names to notice,
it cannot be necessary to give the weakest writers of its weakest part
more than that summary mention which is at once necessary and sufficient
to complete the picture of the literary movement of the time. And this
is more especially the case with reference to the minor verse of the end
of the eighteenth century. The earliest work of the really great men who
re-created English poetry, though in some cases chronologically _in_, is
not in the least _of_ it. For the rest, it would be almost enough to say
that William Hayley, the preface to whose _Triumphs of Temper_ is dated
January 1781, and therefore synchronised very closely with the literary
appearance of Cowper, Crabbe, and Blake, was one of the most
conspicuous, and remains one of the most characteristic of them.
Hayley's personal relations with the first and last of these
poets--relations which have kept and will keep his name in some measure
alive long after the natural death of his verse--were in both cases
conditioned by circumstances in a rather trying way, but were not
otherwise than creditable to him. His verse itself is impossible and
intolerable to any but the student of literary history, who knows that
all things are possible, and finds the realisation of all in its measure
interesting. The heights, or at least the average levels, of Hayley may
be fairly taken from the following quotation:--
Her lips involuntary catch the chime
And half articulate the soothing rhyme;
Till weary thought no longer watch can keep,
But sinks reluctant in the folds of sleep--
of which it can only be said that any schoolboy could write it; his not
infrequent depths from the couplet:--
Her airy guard prepares the softest down
From Peace's wing to line the nuptial crown.
where the image of a guardian angel holding Peace with the firmness of
an Irish housewife, and plucking her steadily in order to line a nuptial
crown (which must have been a sort of sun-bonnet) with the down thereof,
will probably be admitted to be not easily surpassable. Of Hayley's
companions in song, I have been dispensed by my predecessor from
troubling myself with Erasmus Darwin, who was perhaps intellectually the
ablest of them, though the extreme absurdity of the scheme of his
_Botanic Garden_ brought him, as the representative of the whole school,
under the lash of the _Anti-Jacobin_ in never-dying lines. Darwin's
friend and townswoman, Anna Seward; Mrs. Barbauld, the author of the
noble lines, "Life, we've been long together"--the nobility of which is
rather in its sentiment than in its expression--and of much tame and
unimportant stuff; Merry, who called himself Della Crusca and gathered
round him the school of gosling imitators that drew on itself the lash
of Gifford; the Laureate Pye; and others who, less fortunate than the
victims of Canning and Frere, have suffered a second death in the
forgetting of the very satires in which they met their deserts, can be
barely named now. Two, however, may claim, if no great performance, a
remarkable influence on great performers. Dr. Sayers, a member of the
interesting Norwich school, directly affected Southey, and not Southey
only, by his unrhymed verse; while the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles,
now only to be read with a mild esteem by the friendliest critic most
conscious of the historic allowance, roused Coleridge to the wildest
enthusiasm and did much to form his poetic taste. To Bowles, and perhaps
to one or two others, we may find occasion to return hereafter.
The satires, however, which have been more than once referred to in the
preceding paragraph, form a most important feature, and a perhaps almost
more important symptom, of the literary state of the time. They show,
indeed, that its weakness did not escape the notice of contemporaries;
but they also show that the very contemporaries who noticed it had
nothing better to give in the way of poetry proper than that which they
satirised. In fact, one of the chief of these satirists, Wolcot, has
left a considerable mass of not definitely satirical work which is
little if at all better than the productions of the authors he
lampooned.
This very remarkable body of satirical verse, which extends from the
_Rolliad_ and the early satires of Peter Pindar at the extreme beginning
of our present time to the _Pursuits of Literature_ and the
_Anti-Jacobin_ towards its close, was partly literary and partly
political, diverging indeed into other subjects, but keeping chiefly to
these two and intermixing them rather inextricably. The _Pursuits of
Literature_, though mainly devoted to the subject of its title, is also
to a great extent political; the _Rolliad_ and the _Probationary Odes_,
intensely political, were also to no small extent literary. The chief
examples were among the most popular literary productions of the time;
and though few of them except the selected _Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_
are now read, almost all the major productions deserve reading. The
great defect of contemporary satire--that it becomes by mere lapse of
time unintelligible--is obviated to no small extent here by the crotchet
(rather fortunate, though sometimes a little tedious) which these
writers, almost without exception, had for elaborate annotation. Of the
chief of them, already indicated more than once by reference or
allusion, some account may be given.
_The Rolliad_ is the name generally given for shortness to a collection
of political satires originating in the great Westminster election of
1784, when Fox was the Whig candidate. It derived its name from a
Devonshire squire, Mr. Rolle, who was a great supporter of Pitt; and,
with the _Political Eclogues_, the mock _Probationary Odes_ for the
laureateship (vacant by Whitehead's death), and the _Political
Miscellanies_, which closed the series, was directed against the young
Prime Minister and his adherents by a knot of members of Brooks' Club,
who are identified rather by tradition and assertion than by positive
evidence. Sheridan, Tierney, Burgoyne, Lord John Townshend, Burke's
brother Richard, and other public men probably or certainly contributed,
as did Ellis--afterwards to figure so conspicuously in the same way on
the other side. But the chief writers were a certain Dr. Lawrence, a
great friend of Burke, who was in a way the editor; Tickel, a descendant
of Addison's friend and a connection of the Sheridans; and another
Irishman named Fitzpatrick. The various "skits" of which the book or
series is composed show considerable literary skill, and there is a
non-political and extraneous interest in the fact that it contains some
_rondeaux_ believed to be the only, or almost the only, examples of that
form written in England between Cotton in the seventeenth century and
the revival of it not very many years ago. The fun is often very good
fun, and there is a lightness and brightness about the verse and
phrasing which had been little seen in English since Prior. But the tone
is purely personal; there are no principles at stake, and the book,
besides being pretty coarse in tone, is a sort of object lesson in the
merely intriguing style of politics which had become characteristic of
England under the great seventy years' reign of the Whigs.
Coarseness and personality, however, are in the _Rolliad_ refined and
high-minded in comparison with the work of "Peter Pindar," which has the
redeeming merit of being even funnier, with the defect of being much
more voluminous and unequal. John Wolcot was a Devonshire man, born in
May 1738 at Kingsbridge, or rather its suburb Dodbrooke, in Devonshire.
He was educated as a physician, and after practising some time at home
was taken by Sir William Trelawney to Jamaica. Here he took orders and
received a benefice; but when he returned to England after Trelawney's
death he practically unfrocked himself and resumed the cure of bodies.
Although he had dabbled both in letters and in art, it was not till 1782
that he made any name; and he did it then by the rather unexpected way
of writing poetical satires in the form of letters to the members of the
infant Royal Academy. From this he glided into satire of the political
kind, which, however, though he was a strong Whig and something more,
did not so much devote itself to the attack or support of either of the
great parties as to personal lampoons on the king, his family, and his
friends. Neither Charles the Second at the hands of Marvell, nor George
the Fourth at the hands of Moore, received anything like the steady fire
of lampoon which Wolcot for years poured upon the most harmless and
respectable of English monarchs. George the Third had indeed no
vices,--unless a certain parsimony may be dignified by that name,--but
he had many foibles of the kind that is more useful to the satirist than
even vice. Wolcot's extreme coarseness, his triviality of subject, and a
vulgarity of thought which is quite a different thing from either, are
undeniable. But _The Lousiad_ (a perfect triumph of cleverness expended
on what the Greeks called rhyparography), the famous pieces on George
and the Apple Dumplings and on the King's visit to Whitbread's Brewery,
with scores of other things of the same kind (the best of all, perhaps,
being the record of the Devonshire Progress), exhibit incredible
felicity and fertility in the lower kinds of satire. This satire Wolcot
could apply with remarkable width of range. His artistic satires (and it
must be admitted that he had not bad taste here) have been noticed. He
riddled the new devotion to physical science in the unlucky person of
Sir Joseph Banks; the chief of his literary lampoons, a thing which is
quite a masterpiece in its way, is his "Bozzy and Piozzi," wherein
Boswell and Mrs. Thrale are made to string in amoebean fashion the
most absurd or the most laughable of their respective reminiscences of
Johnson into verses which, for lightness and liveliness of burlesque
representation, have hardly a superior. Until the severe legislation
which followed the Jacobin terror in France cowed him, and to some
extent even subsequently, Wolcot maintained a sort of Ishmaelite
attitude, by turns attacking and defending himself against men of
eminence in literature and politics, after a fashion the savagery
whereof was excused sometimes by its courage and nearly always by an
exuberant good-humour which both here and elsewhere accompanies very
distinct ill-nature. His literary life in London covered about a quarter
of a century, after which, losing his sight, he retired once more to the
West, though he is said to have died at Somers Town in 1819. The best
edition of his works is in five good-sized volumes, but it is known not
to be complete.
Both the _Rolliad_ men and Wolcot had been on the Whig, Wolcot almost on
the Republican side; and for some years they had met with no sufficient
adversaries, though Gifford soon engaged "Peter" on fairly equal terms.
The great revulsion of feeling, however, which the acts of the French
Revolution induced among Englishmen generally drew on a signal rally on
the Tory part. The _Anti-Jacobin_ newspaper, with Gifford as its editor,
and Canning, Ellis (now a convert), and Frere as its chief contributors,
not merely had at its back the national sentiment and the official
power, but far outstripped in literary vigour and brilliancy the
achievements of the other side. The famous collection above referred to,
_The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_, which has been again and again
reprinted, shows no signs of losing its attraction,--a thing almost
unparalleled in the case of satirical work nearly a century old. Its
very familiarity makes it unnecessary to dwell much on it, but it is
safe to say that nothing of the kind more brilliant has ever been
written, or is very likely ever to be written, than the parodies of
Southey's Sapphics and "Henry Martin" sonnet, the litany of the
Jacobins, French and English, the "skits" on Payne Knight and Darwin,
_The Rovers_,--mocking the new German sentimentalism and
mediaevalism,--and the stately satire of "The New Morality,"--where,
almost alone, the writers become serious, and reach a height not
attained since Dryden.
Gifford and Mathias differ from the others just mentioned in being less
directly political in writing and inspiration, though Gifford at least
was a strong politician. He was, like Wolcot, a Devonshire man, born at
Ashburton in 1757, and, as his numerous enemies and victims took care
often to remind him, of extremely humble birth and early breeding,
having been a shoemaker's apprentice. Attracting attention as a clever
boy, he was sent to Exeter College and soon attained to influential
patronage. To do him justice, however, he made his reputation by the
work of his own hand,--his satires of _The Baviad_, 1794, and _The
Maeviad_ next year, attacking and pretty nearly extinguishing Merry and
his Della Cruscans, a set of minor bards and mutual admirers who had
infested the magazines and the libraries for some years.[1] The
_Anti-Jacobin_ and the editing of divers English classics put Gifford
still higher; and when the _Quarterly Review_ was established in
opposition to the _Edinburgh_, his appointment (1809) to the editorship,
which he held almost till his death (he gave it up in 1824 and died in
1826), completed his literary position. Gifford is little read nowadays,
and a name which was not a very popular one even on his own side during
his lifetime has, since the triumph of the politics and of some of the
literary styles which he opposed, become almost a byword for savage and
unfair criticism. The penalty of unfairness is usually and rightly paid
in kind, and Gifford has paid it very amply. The struggles of his youth
and lifelong ill-health no doubt aggravated a disposition at no time
very sweet; and the feuds of the day, both literary and political, were
apt to be waged, even by men far superior to Gifford in early and
natural advantages, with the extremest asperity and without too much
scruple. But Gifford is perhaps our capital example in English of a cast
of mind which is popularly identified with that of the critic, though in
truth nothing is more fatal to the attainment of the highest critical
competence. It was apparently impossible for him (as it has been, and,
it would seem, is for others,) to regard the author whom he was
criticising, the editor who had preceded him in his labours, or the
adversary with whom he was carrying on a polemic, as anything but a
being partly idiotic and partly villainous, who must be soundly scolded,
first for having done what he did, and secondly to prevent him from
doing it again. So ingrained was this habit in Gifford that he could
refrain from indulging it, neither in editing the essays of his most
distinguished contributors, nor in commenting on the work of these
contributors, outside the periodicals which he directed. Yet he was a
really useful influence in more ways than one. The service that he did
in forcibly suppressing the Della Cruscan nuisance is even yet admitted,
and there has been plentiful occasion, not always taken, for similar
literary _dragonnades_ since. And his work as an editor of English
classics was, blemishes of manner and temper excepted, in the main very
good work.
Thomas James Mathias, the author of _The Pursuits of Literature_, was a
much nearer approach to the pedant pure and simple. For he did not, like
Gifford, redeem his rather indiscriminate attacks on contemporaries by a
sincere and intelligent devotion to older work; and he was, much more
than Gifford, ostentatious of such learning as he possessed. Accordingly
the immense popularity of his only book of moment is a most remarkable
sign of the times. De Quincey, who had seen its rise and its fall,
declares that for a certain time, and not a very short one, at the end
of the last century and the beginning of this, _The Pursuits of
Literature_ was the most popular book of its own day, and as popular as
any which had appeared since; and that there is not very much hyperbole
in this is proved by its numerous editions, and by the constant
references to it in the books of the time. Colman, who was one of
Mathias' victims, declared that the verse was a "peg to hang the notes
on"; and the habit above referred to certainly justified the gibe to no
small extent. If the book is rather hard reading nowadays (and it is
certainly rather difficult to recognise in it even the "demon of
originality" which De Quincey himself grants rather grudgingly as an
offset to its defects of taste and scholarship), it is perhaps chiefly
obscured by the extreme desultoriness of the author's attacks and the
absence of any consistent and persistent target. Much that Mathias
reprehends in Godwin and Priestley, in Colman and Wolcot, and a whole
crowd of lesser men, is justifiably censured; much that he lays down is
sound and good enough. But the whole--which, after the wont of the time,
consists of several pieces jointed on to each other and all flooded with
notes--suffers from the twin vices of negation and divagation. Indeed,
its chief value is that, both by its composition and its reception, it
shows the general sense that literature was not in a healthy state, and
that some renaissance, some reaction, was necessary.
The prominence of the French Revolution, which has already appeared more
than once in the above account of late eighteenth century poetry, is
still more strongly reflected in the prose writing of the period.
Indeed, many of its principal writers devoted their chief attention
either to describing, to attacking, or to defending the events and
principles of this portentous phenomenon. The chief of them were John
Moore, Arthur Young, Helen Maria Williams, Thomas Paine, William Godwin,
Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Holcroft. Of these Price,
a veteran who had nearly reached his sixtieth year when our period
commences, chiefly belongs to literature as an antagonist of Burke, as
does Priestley, whose writing was very extensive, but who was as much
more a "natural philosopher" than a man of letters as Price was much
less a man of letters than a moralist and a statistician. Both,
moreover, have been mentioned in the preceding volume, and it is not
necessary to say much about them, or about John Horne Tooke (1736-1812),
philologist and firebrand.
Of the others something may, and in some cases not a little must,
appear. Dr. John Moore, sometimes called "Zeluco" Moore (from his most
popular book), and father of the general who fell at Corunna, was born
at Stirling in the winter of 1729-30. Studying medicine at Glasgow, he
was apprenticed (as Smollett had been earlier) to Dr. John Gordon, and
entered the army as surgeon's mate for the Laufeldt campaign. He then
lived two years in Paris, perfecting himself in medicine, after which he
established himself in Glasgow. After many years' practice there, he
accompanied the young Duke of Hamilton on various travels through
Europe, and in 1778 settled in London. This was his headquarters for the
rest of his life, till his death at Richmond on 21st January 1803. The
chief interruption to his residence there was his memorable journey with
Lord Lauderdale to Paris in the latter half of 1792, which resulted in
one of the most vivid and trustworthy accounts by an eyewitness of the
opening scenes of the Terror. This _Journal during a Residence in
France_ was published during the next two years. But Moore had earlier
than this, though not very early in his own life, become an author. His
_View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany_, the
result of his journeyings with the Duke, appeared in 1779, with a
continuation relating to Italy two years later; and in 1786 he published
his one famous novel _Zeluco_. After the _Journal_ he returned to novel
writing in _Edward_ (1796) and _Mordaunt_ (1800)--books by no means
contemptible, but suffering from the want of a central interest and of a
more universal grasp of character and manners. He contributed a Life of
Smollett and an Essay on Romance to an edition of his friend's works in
1797. One or two medical books also stand to his credit, while he had
rather unadvisedly added to his admirable _Journal_ a _View of the
Causes of the French Revolution_ which is not worthy of it. His complete
works fill seven volumes.
Of these, the earlier travels are readable enough, and sometimes very
noteworthy in matter. It is almost enough to say that they contain some
of the latest accounts by an Englishman of France while it was still
merry, and of Venice while it was still independent; an early picture of
Alpine travel; very interesting personal sketches of Voltaire and
Frederick the Great; and one memorable passage (remembered and borrowed
by Scott in _Redgauntlet_) telling how at Florence the shadow of Prince
Charlie, passing the Duke of Hamilton in the public walks, fixed his
eyes earnestly on the Duke, as though saying, "Our ancestors were better
acquainted." _Zeluco_ and the _Journal_ alone deserve much attention
from any one but a professed student of literature. The value of the
latter has been admitted by all competent authorities, and it is
enhanced by the fact that Moore was a strong Whig, and was even accused
by some zealots of favouring Jacobinism. His picture, therefore, of the
way in which political revolution glides into ethical anarchy is
certainly unbiassed the other way. Of _Zeluco_ everybody, without
perhaps a very clear knowledge of its authorship, knows one passage--the
extremely humorous letter containing the John Bull contempt of the
sailor Dawson for the foolish nation which clothes its troops in "white,
which is absurd, and blue, which is only fit for the artillery and the
blue horse." But few know much more, though there is close by a much
more elaborate and equally good piece of Smollettian fun in the quarrel
of Buchanan and Targe, the Scotch Whig and Jacobite, over the reputation
of Queen Mary. The book, however, besides the unlucky drawback that
almost all its interest lies in the latter part, has for hero a sort of
lifeless monster of wickedness, who is quite as uninteresting as a
faultless one, and shows little veracity of character except in the
minor personages and episodes. In these, and indeed throughout Moore's
work, there is a curious mixture of convention with extreme shrewdness,
of somewhat commonplace expression with a remarkably pregnant and
humorous conception. But he lacks concentration and finish, and is
therefore never likely to be much read again as a whole.
There may appear to be some slight inconsistency in giving a paragraph,
if only a short one, to Arthur Young where distinct mention has been
refused to Price and Priestley. But Olivier de Serres has secured a
place in all histories of French literature as a representative of
agricultural writing, and Young is our English Serres. Moreover, his
_Survey of France_ has permanent attraction for its picture of the state
of that country just before, and in the earliest days of, the
Revolution. And though his writing is extremely incorrect and unequal,
though its literary effect is much injured by the insertion of
statistical details which sometimes turn it for pages together into a
mere set of tables, he has constant racy phrases, some of which have
passed into the most honourable state of all--that of unidentified
quotation--while more deserve it. He was born in 1741, the son of a
Suffolk clergyman, was connected by marriage with the Burneys, and very
early developed the passion for agricultural theory and practice which
marked his whole life, even when in his later years (he lived till 1820)
he fell under the influence of religious crotchets. His French travels
were published in 1792-94, and form by far his most attractive book,
though his surveys of England and Ireland contain much that is good.
Young was a keen, though not a very consistent or clear-sighted
politician, especially on the side of political economy. But, like other
men of his time, he soon fell away from his first love for the French
Revolution. In the literary, historical, and antiquarian associations of
the places he visited, he seems to have felt no interest whatever.
Helen Maria Williams, with Young and Moore, is our chief English witness
for the state of France and Paris just before and during the early years
of the Revolution. She was one of Johnson's girl pets in his latest
years, but Boswell is certainly justified in suggesting that if the sage
had lived a little longer he would certainly not have repeated his
elegant compliment: "If I am so ill when you are near, what should I be
when you are away?" She outlived this phase also of her life, and did
not die till 1828, being then sixty-five. Even in the early days she had
been a Girondist, not a Jacobin; but she happened to live in Paris
during the outbreak of the Revolution, wrote _Letters from France_,
which had a great popularity, and was hand in glove with most of the
English and Irish revolutionary leaders. Wolfe Tone in his diary speaks
of her as "Miss Jane Bull completely," but neither prudery nor
patriotism would have struck persons less prejudiced than the leader of
the United Irishmen as the leading points of Helen Maria. Her poems,
published in 1786, during her pre-revolutionary days, are dedicated to
Queen Charlotte, and nearly half the first of the two pretty little
volumes (which have a horrific frontispiece of the Princes in the Tower,
by Maria Cosway) is occupied by a stately list of subscribers, with the
Prince of Wales at their head. They have little merit, but are not
uninteresting for their "signs of the times": sonnets, a tale called
_Edwin and Eltruda_, an address to Sensibility, and so forth. But the
longest, _Peru_, is in the full eighteenth century couplet with no sign
of innovation. The _Letters from France_, which extend to eight volumes,
possess, besides the interest of their subject, the advantage of a more
than fair proficiency on the author's part in the formal but not
ungraceful prose of her time, neither unduly Johnsonian nor in any way
slipshod. But it may perhaps be conceded that, but for the interest of
the subject, they would not be of much importance.
The most distinguished members of the Jacobin school, from the literary
point of view, were Thomas Paine and William Godwin. Paine was only a
literary man by accident. He was born at Thetford on 29th January 1737,
in the rank of small tradesman, and subsequently became a custom-house
officer. But he lost his place for debt and dubious conduct in 1774, and
found a more congenial home in America, where he defended the rebellion
of the Colonies in a pamphlet entitled _Common Sense_. His new
compatriots rewarded him pretty handsomely, and after about a dozen
years he returned to Europe, visiting England, which, however, he left
again very shortly (it is said owing to the persuasion of Blake), just
in time to escape arrest. He had already made friends in France, and his
publication of _The Rights of Man_ (1791-92), in answer to Burke's
attack on the Revolution, made him enormously popular in that country.
He was made a French citizen, and elected by the Pas de Calais to the
Convention. His part here was not discreditable. He opposed the King's
execution, and, being expelled the Convention and imprisoned by the
Jacobins, wrote his other notorious work, _The Age of Reason_ (1794-95),
in which he maintained the Deist position against both Atheism and
Christianity. He recovered his liberty and his seat, and was rather a
favourite with Napoleon. In 1802 he went back to America, and died there
(a confirmed drunkard it is said and denied) seven years later. A few
years later still, Cobbett, in one of his sillier moods, brought
Paine's bones back to England, which did not in the least want them.
The coarse and violent expression, as well as the unpopular matter, of
Paine's works may have led to his being rather unfairly treated in the
hot fights of the Revolutionary period; but the attempts which have
recently been made to whitewash him are a mere mistake of reaction, or
paradox, or pure stupidity. The charges which used to be brought against
his moral character matter little; for neither side in these days had,
or in any days has, a monopoly of loose or of holy living. But two facts
will always remain: first, that Paine attacked subjects which all
require calm, and some of them reverent, treatment, in a tone of the
coarsest violence; and, secondly, that he engaged in questions of the
widest reach, and requiring endless thought and reading, with the scanty
equipments and the superabundant confidence of a self-educated man. No
better instance of this latter characteristic could be produced or
required than a sentence in the preface to the second part of the _Age
of Reason_. Here Paine (who admitted that he had written the first part
hastily, in expectation of imprisonment, without a library, and without
so much as a copy of the Scriptures he was attacking at hand, and who
further confessed that he knew neither Hebrew nor Greek nor even Latin)
observes: "I have produced a work that no Bible-believer, though writing
at his ease and with a library of Church books about him, can refute."
In this charming self-satisfaction, which only natural temper assisted
by sufficient ignorance can attain in perfection, Paine strongly
resembles his disciple Cobbett. But the two were also alike in the
effect which this undoubting dogmatism, joined to a very clear, simple,
and forcible style, less correct in Paine's case than in Cobbett's,
produced upon readers even more ignorant than themselves, and greatly
their inferiors in mental strength and literary skill. Paine, indeed,
was as much superior to Cobbett in logical faculty as he was his
inferior in range of attainments and charm of style; while his ignorance
and his arbitrary assumption and exclusion of premises passed unnoticed
by the classes whom he more particularly addressed. He was thus among
the lower and lower middle classes by far the most formidable propagator
of anarchist ideas in religion and politics that England produced; and
his influence lasted till far into the present century, being, it is
said, only superseded by new forms of a similar spirit. But he never
could have had much on persons of education, unless they were prepared
to sympathise with him, or were of singularly weak mind.
William Godwin, on the other hand, affected the "educated persons," and
those of more or less intellectual power, even more forcibly than Paine
affected the vulgar. This influence of his, indeed, is a thing almost
unique, and it has perhaps never yet been succinctly examined and
appraised. Born at Wisbech in 1756, the son of a dissenting minister, he
himself was thoroughly educated for the Presbyterian ministry, and for
some five years discharged its functions. Then in 1783 (again the
critical period) he became unorthodox in theology, and took to
literature, addicting himself to Whig politics. He also did a certain
amount of tutoring. It was not, however, till nearly ten years after he
had first taken to writing that he made his mark, and attained the
influence above referred to by a series of works rather remarkably
different in character. 1793 saw the famous _Inquiry concerning
Political Justice_, which for a time carried away many of the best and
brightest of the youth of England. Next year came the equally famous and
more long-lived novel of _Caleb Williams_, and an extensive criticism
(now much forgotten, but at the time of almost equal importance with
these), published in the _Morning Chronicle_, of the charge of Lord
Chief-Justice Eyre in the trial of Horne Tooke, Holcroft, and others for
high treason. Godwin himself ran some risk of prosecution; and that he
was left unmolested shows that the Pitt government did not strain its
powers, as is sometimes alleged. In 1797 he published _The Enquirer_, a
collection of essays on many different subjects; and in 1799 his second
remarkable novel (it should be said that in his early years of struggle
he had written others which are quite forgotten) _St. Leon_. The
closing years of the period also saw first his connection and then his
marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft, who will be noticed immediately after
him.
It is rather curious that Godwin, who was but forty-four at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, and continued to be a diligent
writer as well as a publisher and bookseller till his death in 1836, his
last years being made comfortable by a place under the Reform Ministry,
never did anything really good after the eighteenth century had closed.
His tragedy _Antonio_ only deserves remembrance because of Lamb's
exquisite account of its damnation. His _Life of Chaucer_ (1801) was one
of the earliest examples of that style of padding and guesswork in
literary biography with which literature has been flooded since. His
later novels--_Fleetwood_, _Mandeville_, _Cloudesley_, etc.--are far
inferior to _Caleb Williams_ (1794) and _St. Leon_ (1799). His _Treatise
of Population_ (1820), in answer to Malthus, was belated and
ineffective; and his _History of the Commonwealth_, in four volumes,
though a very respectable compilation, is nothing more. Godwin's
character was peculiar, and cannot be said to be pleasing. Though
regarded (or at least described) by his enemies as an apostle of
license, he seems to have been a rather cold-blooded person, whose one
passion for Mary Wollstonecraft was at least as much an affair of the
head as of the heart. He was decidedly vain, and as decidedly priggish;
but the worst thing about him was his tendency to "sponge"--a tendency
which he indulged not merely on his generous son-in-law Shelley, but on
almost everybody with whom he came in contact. It is, however, fair to
admit that this tendency (which was probably a legacy of the patronage
system) was very wide-spread at the time; that the mighty genius of
Coleridge succumbed to it to a worse extent even than Godwin did; and
that Southey himself, who for general uprightness and independence has
no superior in literary history, was content for years to live upon the
liberality not merely of an uncle, but of a school comrade, in a way
which in our own days would probably make men of not half his moral
worth seriously uncomfortable.
Estimates of the strictly formal excellence of Godwin's writing have
differed rather remarkably. To take two only, his most recent
biographer, Mr. Kegan Paul, is never weary of praising the "beauty" of
Godwin's style; while Scott, a very competent and certainly not a very
savage critic, speaks of the style of the Chaucer as "uncommonly
depraved, exhibiting the opposite defects of meanness and of bombast."
This last is too severe; but I am unable often to see the great beauty,
the charm, and so forth, which Godwin's admirers have found in his
writings. He shows perhaps at his best in this respect in _St. Leon_,
where there are some passages of a rather artificial, but solemn and
grandiose beauty; and he can seldom be refused the praise of a capable
and easily wielded fashion of writing, equally adapted to exposition,
description, and argument. But that Godwin's taste and style were by no
means impeccable is proved by his elaborate essay on the subject in the
_Enquirer_, where he endeavours to show that the progress of English
prose-writing had been one of unbroken improvement since the time of
Queen Elizabeth, and pours contempt on passages of Shakespeare and
others where more catholic appreciation could not fail to see the
beauty. In practice his special characteristic, which Scott (or Jeffrey,
for the criticism appeared in the _Edinburgh_) selected for special
reprobation in the context of the passage quoted above, was the
accumulation of short sentences, very much in the manner of which, in
the two generations since his death, Macaulay and the late Mr. J. R.
Green, have been the chief exponents. Hazlitt probably learnt this from
Godwin; and I think there is no doubt that Macaulay learnt it from
Hazlitt.
It may, however, be freely admitted that whatever Godwin had to say was
at least likely not to be prejudicially affected by the manner in which
he said it. And he had, as we have seen, a great deal to say in a great
many kinds. The "New Philosophy," as it was called, of the _Political
Justice_ was to a great extent softened, if not positively retracted, in
subsequent editions and publications; but its quality as first set forth
accounts both for the conquest which it, temporarily at least, obtained
over such minds as those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and for the horror
with which it was regarded elsewhere. Godwin's system was not too
consistent, and many of its parts were borrowed more or less directly
from others: from Locke, from Hume, from the French materialists, from
Jonathan Edwards, and, by way of reaction as well as imitation, from
Rousseau. But Godwin's distinctive claim, if not exactly glory, is that
he was the first systematic Anarchist. His cardinal principle was that
government in itself, and with all its consequences of law, restriction,
punishment, etc., is bad, and to be got rid of. He combined this
(logically enough) with perfectibilism--supposing the individual to be
infinitely susceptible of "melioration" by the right use of reason--and
(rather illogically) with necessarianism. In carrying out his views he
not only did not hesitate at condemning religion, marriage, and all
other restrictions of the kind, but indulged in many curious crotchets
as to the uselessness, if not mischievousness, of gratitude and other
sentiments generally considered virtuous. The indefinite development of
the individual by reason and liberty, and the general welfare of the
community at large, were the only standards that he admitted. And it
should be said, to his credit, that he condemned the use of violence and
physical force _against_ government quite as strongly as their use _by_
government. The establishment of absolute liberty, in the confidence
that it will lead to absolute happiness, was, at first at any rate, the
main idea of the _Political Justice_, and it is easy to understand what
wild work it must have made with heads already heated by the
thunder-weather of change that was pervading Europe.
Godwin has been frequently charged with alarm at the anarchist phantom
he had raised. It is certain not merely that he altered and softened the
_Political Justice_ not a little, but that in his next work of the same
kind, _The Enquirer_, he took both a very different line of
investigation and a different tone of handling. In the preface he
represents it as a sort of inductive complement to the high _a priori_
scheme of his former work; but this is not a sufficient account of the
matter. It is true that his paradoxical rebellion against conventions
appears here and there; and his literary criticism, which was never
strong, may be typified by his contrast of the "hide-bound sportiveness"
of Fielding with the "flowing and graceful hilarity" of Sterne. Indeed,
this sentence takes Godwin's measure pretty finally, and shows that he
was of his age, not for all time. But, on the other hand, it is fair to
say that the essays on "The Study of the Classics" and the "Choice of
Reading," dealing with subjects on which, both then and since, oceans of
cant and nonsense have been poured forth, are nearly as sound as they
can be.
In his purely imaginative work he presents a contrast not much less
strange. We may confine attention here to the two capital examples of
it. _Caleb Williams_ alone has survived as a book of popular reading,
and it is no small tribute to its power that, a full century after its
publication, it is still kept on sale in sixpenny editions. Yet on no
novel perhaps is it so difficult to adjust critical judgment, either by
the historical or the personal methods. Both its general theme--the
discovery of a crime committed by a man of high reputation and unusual
moral worth, and the persecution of the discoverer by the criminal--and
its details, are thoroughly leavened and coloured by Godwin's political
and social views at the time; and either this or some other defect has
made it readable with great difficulty at all times by some persons,
among whom I am bound to enrol myself. Yet the ingenuity of its
construction, in spite of the most glaring impossibilities, the striking
situations it contains, and no doubt other merits, have always secured
readers for it. _St. Leon_, a romance of the _elixir vitae_, has no
corresponding central interest, and, save in the amiable but very
conventional figure of the heroine Marguerite, who is said to have been
studied from Mary Wollstonecraft, no interest of character; while its
defects of local colour and historical truth are glaring. But Godwin,
who was in so many ways a mirror of the new thought of the time, had
caught by anticipation something of its nascent spirit of romance. He is
altogether a rather puzzling person; and perhaps the truest explanation
of the puzzle, as well as certainly the most comfortable to the critic,
is that his genius and literary temperament were emphatically crude and
undeveloped, that he was a prophet rather than anything else, and that
he had the incoherencies and the inconsistencies almost inseparable from
prophecy.
Even if fate and metaphysical aid had not conjoined Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft in the closest bond possible between man and woman, it
would have been proper to mention their names together as authors. For
as Godwin's "New Philosophy" was the boldest attempt made by any man of
the time in print to overthrow received conventions of the relations of
man to man, and incidentally of man to woman, so was his wife's
_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ a complement of it in relation to
the status of the other sex as such. She was rather hardly treated in
her own time; Horace Walpole calling her, it is said (I have not
verified the quotation), a "hyena in petticoats": it would be at least
as just to call Lord Orford a baboon in breeches. And though of late
years she has been made something of a heroine, it is to be feared that
admiration has been directed rather to her crotchets than to her
character. This last appears to have been as lovable as her hap was ill.
The daughter of an Irishman of means, who squandered them and became a
burden on his children; the sister of an attorney who was selfishly
indifferent to his sisters--she had to fend for herself almost entirely.
At one time she and her sisters kept school; then she was, thanks to the
recommendation of Mr. Prior, a master at Eton, introduced as governess
to the family of Lord Kingsborough; then, after doing hack-work for
Johnson, the chief Liberal publisher of the period, she went to Paris,
and unluckily fell in with a handsome scoundrel, Gilbert Imlay, an
American soldier. She lived with him, he deserted her, and she nearly
committed the suicide which was actually the fate of her unfortunate
daughter by him, Fanny Imlay or Godwin. Only at the last had she a
glimpse of happiness. Godwin, who had some weaknesses, but who was not a
scoundrel, met her, and fell in love with her, and as both had
independently demonstrated that marriage was a failure, they naturally
married; but she died a week after giving birth to a daughter--the
future Mrs. Shelley. The _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, on which
Mary Wollstonecraft's fame as an author almost wholly rests, is in some
ways a book nearly as faulty as it can be. It is not well written; it is
full of prejudices quite as wrong-headed as those it combats; it shows
very little knowledge either of human nature or of good society; and its
"niceness," to use the word in what was then its proper sense, often
goes near to the nasty. But its protest on the one hand against the
"proper" sentimentality of such English guides of female youth as Drs.
Fordyce and Gregory, on the other against the "improper" sentimentality
of Rousseau, is genuine and generous. Many of its positions and
contentions may be accepted unhesitatingly to-day by those who are by no
means enamoured of advanced womanhood; and Mary, as contrasted with most
of her rights-of-women followers, is curiously free from bumptiousness
and the general qualities of the virago. She had but ill luck in life,
and perhaps showed no very good judgment in letters, but she had neither
bad brains nor bad blood; and the references to her, long after her
death, by such men as Southey, show the charm which she exercised.
With Godwin also is very commonly connected Thomas Holcroft (or, as Lamb
always preferred to spell the name, "_Ould_craft"), a curiosity of
literature and a rather typical figure of the time. Holcroft was born in
London in December 1745, quite in the lowest ranks, and himself rose
from being stable-boy at Newmarket, through the generally democratic
trade of shoemaking, to quasi-literary positions as schoolmaster and
clerk, and then to the dignity of actor. He was about thirty-five when
he first began regular authorship; and during the rest of his life he
wrote four novels, some score and a half of plays, and divers other
works, none of which is so good as his Autobiography, published after
his death by Hazlitt, and said to be in part that writer's work. It
would have been fortunate for Holcroft if he had confined himself to
literature; for some of his plays, notably _The Road to Ruin_, brought
him in positively large sums of money, and his novels were fairly
popular. But he was a violent democrat,--some indeed attributed to him
the origination of most of the startling things in Godwin's _Political
Justice_,--and in 1794 he was tried, though with no result, for high
treason, with Horne Tooke and others. This brought him into the society
of the young Jacobin school,--Coleridge, and the rest,--but was
disastrous to the success of his plays; and when he went abroad in 1799
he entered on an extraordinary business of buying old masters (which
were rubbish) and sending them to England, where they generally sold for
nothing. He returned, however, and died on 23rd March 1809.
Holcroft's theatre will best receive such notice as it requires in
connection with the other drama of the century. Of his novels, _Alwyn_,
the first, had to do with his experiences as an actor, and _Hugh Trevor_
is also supposed to have been more or less autobiographical. Holcroft's
chief novel, however, is _Anna St. Ives_, a book in no less than seven
volumes, though not very large ones, which was published in 1792, and
which exhibits no small affinities to Godwin's _Caleb Williams_, and
indeed to the _Political Justice_ itself. And Godwin, who was not above
acknowledging mental obligations, if he was rather ill at discharging
pecuniary ones, admits the influence which Holcroft had upon him. _Anna
St. Ives_, which, like so many of the other novels of its day, is in
letters, is worth reading by those who can spare the time. But it cannot
compare, for mere amusement, with the very remarkable _Memoir_ above
referred to. Only about a fourth of this is said to be in Holcroft's own
words; but Hazlitt has made excellent matter of the rest, and it
includes a good deal of diary and other authentic work. In his own part
Holcroft shows himself a master of the vernacular, as well as (what he
undoubtedly was) a man of singular shrewdness and strength of mental
temper.
The Novel school of the period (to which Holcroft introduces us) is full
and decidedly interesting, though it contains at the best one
masterpiece, _Vathek_, and a large number of more or less meritorious
attempts in false styles. The kind was very largely written--much more
so than is generally thought. Thus Godwin, in his early struggling days,
and long before the complete success of _Caleb Williams_, wrote, as has
been mentioned, for trifling sums of money (five and ten guineas), two
or three novels which even the zeal of his enthusiastic biographer does
not seem to have been able to recover. Nor did the circulating library,
even then a flourishing institution, lack hands more or less eminent to
work for it, or customers to take off its products. The Minerva Press,
much cited but little read, had its origin in this our time; and this
time is entitled to the sole and single credit of starting and carrying
far a bastard growth of fiction, the "tale of terror," which continued
to be cultivated in its simplest form for at least half a century, and
which can hardly be said to be quite obsolete yet. But as usual we must
proceed by special names, and there is certainly no lack of them.
"Zeluco" Moore has been dealt with already; Day, the eccentric author of
_Sanford and Merton_, belongs mainly to an earlier period, and died,
still a young man, in the year of the French Revolution; but, besides,
Holcroft, Beckford, Bage, Cumberland, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis,
with Mrs. Inchbald, are distinctly "illustrations" of the time, and must
have more or less separate mention.
William Beckford is one of the problems of English literature. He was
one of the richest men in England, and his long life--1760 to 1844--was
occupied for the most part not merely with the collection, but with the
reading of books. That he could write as well as read he showed as a
mere boy by his satirical _Memoirs of Painters_, and by the
great-in-little novel of _Vathek_ (1783), respecting the composition of
which in French or English divers fables are told. Then he published
nothing for forty years, till in 1834 and 1835 he issued his _Travels in
Italy, Spain, and Portugal_, recollections of his earliest youth. These
travels have extraordinary merits of their kind; but _Vathek_ is a kind
almost to itself. The history of the Caliph, in so far as it is a satire
on unlimited power, is an eighteenth century commonplace; while many
traits in it are obviously imitated from Voltaire. But the figure of
Nouronihar, which Byron perhaps would have equalled if he could, stands
alone in literature as a fantastic projection of the potentiality of
evil magnificence in feminine character; and the closing scenes in the
domain of Eblis have the grandeur of Blake combined with that finish
which Blake's temperament, joined to his ignorance of literature and his
lack of scholarship, made it impossible for him to give. The book is
quite unique. It could hardly, in some of its weaker parts especially,
have been written at any other time; and yet its greater characteristics
have nothing to do with that time. In the florid kind of supernatural
story it has no equal. Only Dante, Beckford, and Scott in _Wandering
Willie's Tale_ have given us Hells that are worthy of the idea of Hell.
Except that both were very much of their time, it would be impossible to
imagine a more complete contrast than that which exists between Beckford
and Bage. The former was, as has been said, one of the richest men in
England, the creator of two "Paradises" at Fonthill and Cintra, the
absolute arbiter of his time and his pleasures, a Member of Parliament
while he chose to be so, a student, fierce and recluse, the husband of a
daughter of the Gordons, and the father of a mother of the Hamiltons,
the collector, disperser, bequeather of libraries almost unequalled in
magnificence and choice. Robert Bage, who was born in 1728 and died in
1801, was in some ways a typical middle-class Englishman. He was a
papermaker, and the son of a papermaker; he was never exactly affluent
nor exactly needy; he was apparently a Quaker by education and a
freethinker by choice; and between 1781 and 1796, obliged by this reason
or that to stain the paper which he made, he produced six novels: _Mount
Henneth_, _Barham Downs_, _The Fair Syrian_, _James Wallace_, _Man as he
is_, and _Hermsprong_. The first, second, and fourth of these were
admitted by Scott to the "Ballantyne Novels," the others, though
_Hermsprong_ is admittedly Bage's best work, were not. It is impossible
to say that there is genius in Bage; yet he is a very remarkable writer,
and there is noticeable in him that singular _fin de siecle_ tendency
which has reasserted itself a century later. An imitator of Fielding and
Smollett in general plan,--of the latter specially in the dangerous
scheme of narrative by letter,--Bage added to their methods the purpose
of advocating a looser scheme of morals and a more anarchical system of
government. In other words, Bage, though a man well advanced in years at
the date of the Revolution, exhibits for us distinctly the spirit which
brought the Revolution about. He is a companion of Godwin and of Mary
Wollstonecraft; and though it must be admitted that, as in other cases,
the presence of "impropriety" in him by no means implies the absence of
dulness, he is full of a queer sort of undeveloped and irregular
cleverness.
The most famous, though not the only novel of Richard Cumberland;
_Henry_, shows the same tendency to break loose from British decorum,
even such decorum as had really been in the main observed by the
much-abused pens of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne himself; but it has
little purpose and indeed little vigour of any kind. Cumberland clung as
close as he could to the method of Fielding, including the preliminary
dissertation or meditation, but he would be a very strange reader who
should mistake the two.
The school of Bage and Cumberland, the former of whom bears some little
resemblance to his countrywoman George Eliot, was, with or without
Bage's purpose, continued more or less steadily; indeed, it may be said
to be little more than a variant, with local colour, of the ordinary
school of novel-writing. But it was not this school which was to give
tone to the period. The "tale of terror" had been started by Horace
Walpole in the _Castle of Otranto_, and had, as we have seen, received a
new and brilliant illustration in the hands of Beckford. But the genius
of the author of _Vathek_ could not be followed; the talent of the
author of the _Castle of Otranto_ was more easily imitated. How far the
practice of the Germans (who had themselves imitated Walpole, and whose
work began in the two last decades of the century to have a great reflex
influence upon England) was responsible for the style of story which,
after Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis had set the fashion, dominated the
circulating libraries for years, is a question not easy and perhaps not
necessary to answer positively. I believe myself that no foreign
influence ever causes a change in national taste; it merely coincides
therewith. But the fact of the set in the tide is unmistakable and
undeniable. For some years the two authors just mentioned rode paramount
in the affections of English novel readers; before long Miss Austen
devoted her early and delightful effort, _Northanger Abbey_, to
satirising the taste for them, and quoted or invented a well-known list
of blood-curdling titles;[2] the morbid talent of Maturin gave a fresh
impulse to it, even after the healthier genius of Scott had already
revolutionised the general scheme of novel-writing; and yet later still
an industrious literary hack, Leitch Ritchie, was able to issue, and it
may be presumed to find readers for, a variety of romance the titles of
which might strike a hasty practitioner of the kind of censure usual in
biblical criticism as a designed parody of Miss Austen's own catalogue.
The style, indeed, in the wide sense has never lost favour. But in the
special Radcliffian form it reigned for some thirty years, and was
widely popular for nearly fifty.
Anne Radcliffe, whose maiden name was Ward, was born on 9th July 1764
and died on 7th February 1822. One of her novels, _Gaston de
Blondeville_, was published posthumously; but otherwise her whole
literary production took place between the years 1789 and 1797. The
first of these years saw _The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne_, a very
immature work; the last _The Italian_, which is perhaps the best.
Between them appeared _A Sicilian Romance_ (1790), _The Romance of the
Forest_ (1791), and the far-famed _Mysteries of Udolpho_ in 1795.
Matthew Gregory Lewis, who, like Beckford, was a West-Indian landowner
and member for Hindon, and was well-to-do if not extremely wealthy, was
nine years younger than Mrs. Radcliffe, and did not produce his famous
_Monk_ till the same year which saw _Udolpho_. He published a good deal
of other work in prose, verse, and drama; the most noteworthy of the
second class being _Tales of Terror_, to which Scott contributed, and
the most noteworthy of the third _The Castle Spectre_. Lewis, who,
despite some foibles, was decidedly popular in the literary and
fashionable society of his time, died in 1818 at the age of forty-five
on his way home from the West Indies. Although he would have us
understand that _The Monk_ was written some time before its actual
publication, Lewis' position as a direct imitator of Mrs. Radcliffe is
unmistakable; and although he added to the characteristics of her novels
a certain appeal to "Lubricity" from which she was completely free, the
general scheme of the two writers, as well as that of all their school,
varies hardly at all. The supernatural in Mrs. Radcliffe's case is
mainly, if not wholly, what has been called "the explained
supernatural,"--that is to say, the apparently ghostly, and certainly
ghastly, effects are usually if not always traced to natural causes,
while in most if not all of her followers the demand for more highly
spiced fare in the reader, and perhaps a defect of ingenuity in the
writer, leaves the devils and witches as they were. In all, without
exception, castles with secret passages, trap-doors, forests, banditti,
abductions, sliding panels, and other apparatus and paraphernalia of the
kind play the main part. The actual literary value is, on the whole,
low; though Mrs. Radcliffe is not without glimmerings, and it is
exceedingly curious to note that, just before the historical novel was
once for all started by Scott, there is in all these writers an absolute
and utter want of comprehension of historical propriety, of local and
temporal colour, and of all the marks which were so soon to distinguish
fiction. Yet at the very same time the yearning after the historical is
shown in the most unmistakable fashion from Godwin down to the Misses
Lee, Harriet and Sophia (the latter of whom in 1783 produced, in _The
Recess_, a preposterous Elizabethan story, which would have liked to be
a historical novel), and other known and unknown writers.
Another lady deserves somewhat longer notice. Hannah More, once a
substantially famous person in literature, is now chiefly remembered by
her association with great men of letters, such as Johnson in her youth,
Macaulay and De Quincey in her old age. She was born as early as 1745
near Bristol, and all her life was a Somerset worthy. She began--a
curious beginning for so serious a lady, but with reforming
intentions--to write for the stage, published _The Search after
Happiness_ when she was seventeen, and had two rather dreary tragedies,
_Percy_ and the _Fatal Secret_, acted, Garrick being a family friend of
hers. Becoming, as her day said, "pious," she wrote "Sacred Dramas," and
at Cowslip Green, Barley Wood, and Clifton produced "Moral Essays," the
once famous novel of _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_, and many tracts,
the best known of which is _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_. She died
at a great age on 7th September 1833. Hannah More is not to be spoken of
with contempt, except by ignorance or incompetence. She had real
abilities, and was a woman of the world. But she was very unfortunately
parted in respect of time, coming just before the days when it became
possible for a lady to be decent in literature without being dull.
If a book and not a chapter were allowed about this curious, and on the
whole rather neglected and undervalued, Fifth Act of the eighteenth
century, many of its minor literary phenomena would have to be noticed:
such as the last state of periodicals before the uprising of the
_Edinburgh Review_, and the local literary coteries, the most notable of
which was that of Norwich, with the Aldersons, Sayers the poet, who
taught Southey and others to try blank verse in other measures than the
decasyllabic, William Taylor, the apostle of German literature in
England, and others. But, as it is, we must concentrate our attention on
its main lines.
In these lines the poetical pioneers, the political and other satirists,
the revolutionary propagandists, and the novelists of terror, are the
four classes of writers that distinguish the period 1780 to 1800; and
perhaps they distinguish it sufficiently, at least for those with whom
historical genesis and connection atone to some extent for want of the
first order of intrinsic interest. In less characteristic classes and in
isolated literary personalities the time was not extremely rich, though
it was not quite barren. We can here only notice cursorily the
theological controversialists who, like Paley, Horsley, and Watson,
waged war against the fresh outburst of aggressive Deism coinciding with
the French Revolution: the scholars, such as, in their different ways,
Dr. Parr, the Whig "moon" of Dr. Johnson; Porson, the famous Cambridge
Grecian, drinker, and democrat; Taylor the Platonist, a strange person
who translated most of the works of Plato and was said to have carried
his discipleship to the extent of a positive Paganism; Gilbert
Wakefield, a miscellaneous writer who wrote rapidly and with little
judgment, but with some scholarship and even some touches of genius, on
a great variety of subjects; Jacob Bryant, mythologist, theologian, and
historical critic, a man of vast learning but rather weak critical
power; and many others. Of some of these we may indeed have more to say
later, as also of the much-abused Malthus, whose famous book, in part
one of the consequences of Godwin, appeared in 1798; while as for drama,
we shall return to that too. Sheridan survived through the whole of the
time and a good deal beyond it; but his best work was done, and the
chief dramatists of the actual day were Colman, Holcroft, Cumberland,
and the farce-writer O'Keefe, a man of humour and a lively fancy.
One, however, of these minor writers has too much of what has been
called "the interest of origins" not to have a paragraph to himself.
William Gilpin, who prided himself on his connection with Bernard
Gilpin, the so-called "Apostle of the North" in the sixteenth century,
was born at Carlisle. But he is best known in connection with the New
Forest, where, after taking his degree at Oxford, receiving orders, and
keeping a school for some time, he was appointed to the living of
Boldre. This he held till his death in 1814. Gilpin was not a
secularly-minded parson by any means; but his literary fame is derived
from the series of Picturesque Tours (_The Highlands_, 1778; _The Wye
and South Wales_, 1782; _The Lakes_, 1789; _Forest Scenery_, 1791; and
_The West of England and the Isle of Wight_, 1798) which he published in
the last quarter of the century. They were extremely popular, they set a
fashion which may be said never to have died out since, and they
attained the seal of parody in the famous _Dr. Syntax_ of William Combe
(1741-1823), an Eton and Oxford man who spent a fortune and then wrote
an enormous amount of the most widely various work in verse and prose,
of which little but _Syntax_ itself (1812 _sqq._) is remembered. Gilpin
himself is interesting as an important member of "the naturals," as they
have been oddly and equivocally called. His style is much more florid
and less just than Gilbert White's, and his observation correspondingly
less true. But he had a keen sense of natural beauty and did much to
instill it into others.
In all the work of the time, however, great and small, from
the half-unconscious inspiration of Burns and Blake to the
common journey-work of book-making, we shall find the same
character--incessantly recurring, and unmistakable afterwards if not
always recognisable at the time--of transition, of decay and seed-time
mingled with and crossing each other. There are no distinct spontaneous
literary schools: the forms which literature takes are either occasional
and dependent upon outward events, such as the wide and varied attack
and defence consequent upon the French Revolution, or else fantastic,
trivial, reflex. Sometimes the absence of any distinct and creative
impulse reveals itself in work really good and useful, such as the
editing of old writers, of which the labours of Malone are the chief
example and the forgeries of Ireland the corresponding corruption; or
the return to their study aesthetically, in which Headley, a now
forgotten critic, did good work. Sometimes it resulted in such things
as the literary reputation (which was an actual thing after a kind) of
persons like Sir James Bland Burges, Under-Secretary of State,
poetaster, connoisseur, and general fribble. Yet all the while, in
schools and universities, in London garrets and country villages, there
was growing up, and sometimes showing itself pretty unmistakably, the
generation which was to substitute for this trying and trifling the
greatest work in verse, and not the least in prose, that had been done
for two hundred years. The _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, the clarion-call
of the new poetry, so clearly sounded, so inattentively heard, might
have told all, and did tell some, what this generation was about to do.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Although _The Baviad_ and _The Maeviad_ are well worth reading, it
may be questioned whether they are as amusing as their chief quarry,
_The British Album_, "containing the poems of Della Crusca, Anna
Matilda, Benedict, Cesario, The Bard, etc.," the two little volumes of
which attained their third edition in 1790. "Della Crusca," or Robert
Merry (1755-98), was a gentleman by birth, and of means, with a Harrow
and Oxford training, and some service in the army. Strange to say, there
is testimony of good wits that he was by no means a fool; yet such
drivelling rubbish as he and his coadjutors wrote even the present day
has hardly seen.
[2] I used to think these titles sprouts of the author's brain; but a
correspondent assured me that one or two at least are certainly genuine.
Possibly, therefore all are.