When our own Literature awoke, taking its origin from the proud
scholarship of the Renaissance, an Englishman who affected it was
scarcely more cumbered with books than our Athenian had been, two
thousand years before. It was, and it remained, aristocratic:
sparingly expensive of its culture. It postulated, if not a slave
population, at least a proletariat for which its blessings were
not. No one thought of making a fortune by disseminating his work
in print. Shakespeare never found it worth while to collect and
publish his plays; and a very small sense of history will suffice
to check our tears over the price received by Milton for
"Paradise Lost." We may wonder, indeed, at the time it took our
forefathers to realise--or, at any rate, to employ--the energy
that lay in the printing-press. For centuries after its invention
mere copying commanded far higher prices than authorship[1].
Writers gave 'authorised' editions to the world sometimes for the
sake of fame, often to justify themselves against piratical
publishers, seldom in expectation of monetary profit. Listen, for
example, to Sir Thomas Browne's excuse for publishing "Religio
Medici" (1643):
Had not almost every man suffered by the press or were not the
tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for
complaint: but in times wherein I have lived to behold the
highest perversion of that excellent invention, the name of his
Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the
writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly
imprinted; complaints may seem ridiculous in private persons;
and men of my condition may be as incapable of affronts, as
hopeless of their reparations. And truly had not the duty I owe
unto the importunity of friends, and the allegiance I must ever
acknowledge unto truth, prevailed with me; the inactivity of
my disposition might have made these sufferings continual,
and time that brings other things to light, should have
satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion. But because things
evidently false are not only printed, but many things of truth
most falsely set forth, in this latter I could not but think
myself engaged. For though we have no power to redress the
former, yet in the other, the reparation being within our
selves, I have at present represented unto the world a full and
intended copy of that piece, which was most imperfectly and
surreptitiously published before.
This I confess, about seven years past, with some others of
affinity thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I
had at leisurable hours composed; which being communicated
unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription
successively corrupted, untill it arrived in a most depraved
copy at the press ... [2]
V
The men of the 18th century maintained the old tradition of
literary exclusiveness, but in a somewhat different way and more
consciously.
I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine
out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary
works. As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it.
You do not, I regret to say, provide me with reasons much more
philosophical than the epigrammatist's for disliking Doctor Fell.
May one whose time of life excuses perhaps a detachment from
passion attempt to provide you with one? If so, first listen to
this from Mr and Mrs Hammond's book "The Village Labourer,"
1760-1832:
A row of 18th century houses, or a room of normal 18th
century furniture, or a characteristic piece of 18th century
literature, conveys at once a sensation of satisfaction and
completeness. The secret of this charm is not to be found in
any special beauty or nobility of design or expression, but
simply in an exquisite fitness. The 18th century mind was a
unity, an order. All literature and art that really belong to
the 18th century are the language of a little society of men
and women who moved within one set of ideas; who understood
each other; who were not tormented by any anxious or
bewildering problems; who lived in comfort, and, above all
things, in composure. The classics were their freemasonry.
There was a standard for the mind, for the emotions, for
taste: there were no incongruities.
When you have a society like this, you have what we
roughly call a civilisation, and it leaves its character and
canons in all its surroundings and in its literature. Its
definite ideas lend themselves readily to expression. A
larger society seems an anarchy in contrast: just because
of its escape into a greater world it seems powerless to
stamp itself in wood or stone; it is condemned as an age of
chaos and mutiny, with nothing to declare.
You do wrong, I assure you, in misprising these men of the 18th
century. They reduced life, to be sure: but by that very means
they saw it far more _completely_ than do we, in this lyrical
age, with our worship of 'fine excess.' Here at any rate, and to
speak only of its literature, you have a society fencing that
literature around--I do not say by forethought or even
consciously--but in effect fencing its literature around, to keep
it in control and capable of an orderly, a nice, even an
exquisite cultivation. Dislike it as you may, I do not think that
any of you, as he increases his knowledge of the technique of
English Prose, yes, and of English Verse (I do not say of English
Poetry) will deny his admiration to the men of the 18th century.
The strength of good prose resides not so much in the swing and
balance of the single sentence as in the marshalling of argument,
the orderly procession of paragraphs, the disposition of parts so
that each finds its telling, its proper, place; the adjustment of
the means to the end; the strategy which brings its full force
into action at the calculated moment and drives the conclusion
home upon an accumulated sense of _justice._ I do not see how any
student of 18th century literature can deny its writers--Berkeley
or Hume or Gibbon--Congreve or Sheridan--Pope or Cowper--Addison
or Steele or Johnson--Burke or Chatham or Thomas Paine--their
meed for this, or, if he be an artist, even his homage.
But it remains true, as your instinct tells you, and as I have
admitted, that they achieved all this by help of narrow and
artificial boundaries. Of several fatal exclusions let me name
but two.
In the first place, they excluded the Poor; imitating in a late
age the Athenian tradition of a small polite society resting on a
large and degraded one. Throughout the 18th century--and the
great Whig families were at least as much to blame for this as
the Tories--by enclosure of commons, by grants, by handling of
the franchise, by taxation, by poor laws in result punitive
though intended to be palliative, the English peasantry underwent
a steady process of degradation into serfdom: into a serfdom
which, during the first twenty years of the next century, hung
constantly and precariously on the edge of actual starvation. The
whole theory of culture worked upon a principle of double
restriction; of restricting on the one hand the realm of polite
knowledge to propositions suitable for a scholar and a gentleman,
and, on the other, the numbers of the human family permitted to
be either. The theory deprecated enthusiasm, as it discountenanced
all ambition in a poor child to rise above what Sir Spencer Walpole
called 'his inevitable and hereditary lot'--to soften which and
make him acquiescent in it was, with a Wilberforce or a Hannah
More, the last dream of restless benevolence.