There is such a thing as Literary Fashion, and prose and verse have been
regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats.
Dr. Kippis, who had a taste for literary history, has observed that
"'Dodsley's Oeconomy of Human Life' long received the most extravagant
applause, from the supposition that it was written by a celebrated
nobleman; an instance of the power of _Literary Fashion_; the history of
which, as it hath appeared in various ages and countries, and as it hath
operated with respect to the different objects of science, learning,
art, and taste, would form a work that might be highly instructive and
entertaining."
The favourable reception of Dodsley's "Oeconomy of Human Life," produced
a whole family of oeconomies; it was soon followed by a _second part_,
the gratuitous ingenuity of one of those officious imitators, whom an
original author never cares to thank. Other oeconomies trod on the heels
of each other.
For some memoranda towards a history of literary fashions, the following
may be arranged:--
At the restoration of letters in Europe, commentators and compilers were
at the head of the literati; translators followed, who enriched
themselves with their spoils on the commentators. When in the progress
of modern literature, writers aimed to rival the great authors of
antiquity, the different styles, in their servile imitations, clashed
together; and parties were formed who fought desperately for the style
they chose to adopt. The public were long harassed by a fantastic race,
who called themselves Ciceronian, of whom are recorded many ridiculous
practices, to strain out the words of Cicero into their hollow
verbosities. They were routed by the facetious Erasmus. Then followed
the brilliant æra of epigrammatic points; and good sense, and good
taste, were nothing without the spurious ornaments of false wit.
Another age was deluged by a million of sonnets; and volumes were for a
long time read, without their readers being aware that their patience
was exhausted. There was an age of epics, which probably can never
return again; for after two or three, the rest can be but repetitions
with a few variations.
In Italy, from 1530 to 1580, a vast multitude of books were written on
Love; the fashion of writing on that subject (for certainly it was not
always a passion with the indefatigable writer) was an epidemical
distemper. They wrote like pedants, and pagans; those who could not
write their love in verse, diffused themselves in prose. When the
Poliphilus of Colonna appeared, which is given in the form of a dream,
this dream made a great many dreamers, as it happens in company (says
the sarcastic Zeno) when one yawner makes many yawn. When Bishop Hall
first published his satires, he called them "Toothless Satires," but his
latter ones he distinguished as "Biting Satires;" many good-natured men,
who could only write good-natured verse, crowded in his footsteps, and
the abundance of their labours only showed that even the "toothless"
satires of Hall could bite more sharply than those of servile imitators.
After Spenser's "Faerie Queen" was published, the press overflowed with
many mistaken imitations, in which fairies were the chief actors--this
circumstance is humorously animadverted on by Marston, in his satires,
as quoted by Warton: every scribe now falls asleep, and in his
----dreams, straight tenne pound to one
Outsteps some _fairy_----
Awakes, straiet rubs his eyes, and PRINTS HIS TALE.
The great personage who gave a fashion to this class of literature was
the courtly and romantic Elizabeth herself; her obsequious wits and
courtiers would not fail to feed and flatter her taste. Whether they all
felt the beauties, or languished over the tediousness of "The Faerie
Queen," and the "Arcadia" of Sidney, at least her majesty gave a vogue
to such sentimental and refined romance. The classical Elizabeth
introduced another literary fashion; having translated the Hercules
Oetacus, she made it fashionable to translate Greek tragedies. There was
a time, in the age of fanaticism, and the Long Parliament, that books
were considered the more valuable for their length. The seventeenth
century was the age of folios. Caryl wrote a "Commentary on Job" in two
volumes folio, of above one thousand two hundred sheets! as it was
intended to inculcate the virtue of patience, these volumes gave at once
the theory and the practice. One is astonished at the multitude of the
divines of this age; whose works now lie buried under the brick and
mortar tombs of four or five folios, which, on a moderate calculation,
might now be "wire-woven" into thirty or forty modern octavos.
In Charles I.'s time, love and honour were heightened by the wits into
florid romance; but Lord Goring turned all into ridicule; and he was
followed by the Duke of Buckingham, whose happy vein of ridicule was
favoured by Charles II., who gave it the vogue it obtained.
Sir William Temple justly observes, that changes in veins of wit are
like those of habits, or other modes. On the return of Charles II., none
were more out of fashion among the new courtiers than the old Earl of
Norwich, who was esteemed the greatest wit, in his father's time, among
the old.
Modern times have abounded with what may be called fashionable
literature. Tragedies were some years ago as fashionable as comedies are
at this day;[29] Thomson, Mallet, Francis, Hill, applied their genius to
a department in which they lost it all. Declamation and rant, and
over-refined language, were preferred to the fable, the manners, and to
nature--and these now sleep on our shelves! Then too we had a family of
paupers in the parish of poetry, in "Imitations of Spenser." Not many
years ago, Churchill was the occasion of deluging the town with
_political poems in quarto_.--These again were succeeded by _narrative
poems_, in the ballad measure, from all sizes of poets.--The Castle of
Otranto was the father of that marvellous, which once over-stocked the
circulating library and closed with Mrs. Radcliffe.--Lord Byron has been
the father of hundreds of graceless sons!--Travels and voyages have long
been a class of literature so fashionable, that we begin to prepare for,
or to dread, the arrival of certain persons from the Continent!
Different times, then, are regulated by different tastes. What makes a
strong impression on the public at one time, ceases to interest it at
another; an author who sacrifices to the prevailing humours of his day
has but little chance of being esteemed by posterity; and every age of
modern literature might, perhaps, admit of a new classification, by
dividing it into its periods of _fashionable literature_.