CHAPTER IX

PERIOD VII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. PSEUDO-CLASSICISM AND THE BEGINNINGS OF

MODERN ROMANTICISM [Footnote: Thackeray's 'Henry Esmond' is the greatest

historical novel relating to the early eighteenth century.]

POLITICAL CONDITIONS. During the first part of the eighteenth century the

direct connection between politics and literature was closer than at any

previous period of English life; for the practical spirit of the previous

generation continued to prevail, so that the chief writers were very ready

to concern themselves with the affairs of State, and in the uncertain

strife of parties ministers were glad to enlist their aid. On the death of

King William in 1702, Anne, sister of his wife Queen Mary and daughter of

James II, became Queen. Unlike King William she was a Tory and at first

filled offices with members of that party. But the English campaigns under

the Duke of Marlborough against Louis XIV were supported by the Whigs,

[Footnote: The Tories were the political ancestors of the present-day

Conservatives; the Whigs of the Liberals.] who therefore gradually regained

control, and in 1708 the Queen had to submit to a Whig ministry. She

succeeded in ousting them in 1710, and a Tory cabinet was formed by Henry

Harley (afterwards Earl of Oxford) and Henry St. John (afterwards Viscount

Bolingbroke). On the death of Anne in 1714 Bolingbroke, with other Tories,

was intriguing for a second restoration of the Stuarts in the person of the

son of James II (the 'Old Pretender'). But the nation decided for a

Protestant German prince, a descendant of James I through his daughter

Elizabeth, [Footnote: The subject of Wotton's fine poem, above, p. 158.]

and this prince was crowned as George I--an event which brought England

peace at the price of a century of rule by an unenlightened and sordid

foreign dynasty. The Tories were violently turned out of office; Oxford was

imprisoned, and Bolingbroke, having fled to the Pretender, was declared a

traitor. Ten years later he was allowed to come back and attempted to

oppose Robert Walpole, the Whig statesman who for twenty years governed

England in the name of the first two Georges; but in the upshot Bolingbroke

was again obliged to retire to France. How closely these events were

connected with the fortunes of the foremost authors we shall see as we

proceed.

THE GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE PERIOD. The writers of the reigns of Anne and

George I called their period the Augustan Age, because they flattered

themselves that with them English life and literature had reached a

culminating period of civilization and elegance corresponding to that which

existed at Rome under the Emperor Augustus. They believed also that both in

the art of living and in literature they had rediscovered and were

practising the principles of the best periods of Greek and Roman life. In

our own time this judgment appears equally arrogant and mistaken. In

reality the men of the early eighteenth century, like those of the

Restoration, largely misunderstood the qualities of the classical spirit,

and thinking to reproduce them attained only a superficial,

pseudo-classical, imitation. The main characteristics of the period and its

literature continue, with some further development, those of the

Restoration, and may be summarily indicated as follows:

1. Interest was largely centered in the practical well-being either of

society as a whole or of one's own social class or set. The majority of

writers, furthermore, belonged by birth or association to the upper social

stratum and tended to overemphasize its artificial conventions, often

looking with contempt on the other classes. To them conventional good

breeding, fine manners, the pleasures of the leisure class, and the

standards of 'The Town' (fashionable London society) were the only part of

life much worth regarding. 2. The men of this age carried still further the

distrust and dislike felt by the previous generation for emotion,

enthusiasm, and strong individuality both in life and in literature, and

exalted Reason and Regularity as their guiding stars. The terms 'decency'

and 'neatness' were forever on their lips. They sought a conventional

uniformity in manners, speech, and indeed in nearly everything else, and

were uneasy if they deviated far from the approved, respectable standards

of the body of their fellows. Great poetic imagination, therefore, could

scarcely exist among them, or indeed supreme greatness of any sort. 3. They

had little appreciation for external Nature or for any beauty except that

of formalized Art. A forest seemed to most of them merely wild and gloomy,

and great mountains chiefly terrible, but they took delight in gardens of

artificially trimmed trees and in regularly plotted and alternating beds of

domestic flowers. The Elizabethans also, as we have seen, had had much more

feeling for the terror than for the grandeur of the sublime in Nature, but

the Elizabethans had had nothing of the elegant primness of the Augustans.

4. In speech and especially in literature, most of all in poetry, they were

given to abstractness of thought and expression, intended to secure

elegance, but often serving largely to substitute superficiality for

definiteness and significant meaning. They abounded in personifications of

abstract qualities and ideas ('Laughter, heavenly maid,' Honor, Glory,

Sorrow, and so on, with prominent capital letters), a sort of a

pseudo-classical substitute for emotion. 5. They were still more fully

confirmed than the men of the Restoration in the conviction that the

ancients had attained the highest possible perfection in literature, and

some of them made absolute submission of judgment to the ancients,

especially to the Latin poets and the Greek, Latin, and also the

seventeenth century classicizing French critics. Some authors seemed

timidly to desire to be under authority and to glory in surrendering their

independence, individuality, and originality to foreign and

long-established leaders and principles. 6. Under these circumstances the

effort to attain the finished beauty of classical literature naturally

resulted largely in a more or less shallow formal smoothness. 7. There was

a strong tendency to moralizing, which also was not altogether free from

conventionality and superficiality.

Although the 'Augustan Age' must be considered to end before the middle of

the century, the same spirit continued dominant among many writers until

near its close, so that almost the whole of the century may be called the

period of pseudo-classicism.

DANIEL DEFOE. The two earliest notable writers of the period, however,

though they display some of these characteristics, were men of strong

individual traits which in any age would have directed them largely along

paths of their own choosing. The first of them is Daniel Defoe, who

belongs, furthermore, quite outside the main circle of high-bred and

polished fashion.

Defoe was born in London about 1660, the son of James Foe, a butcher, to

whose name the son arbitrarily and with characteristic eye to effect

prefixed the 'De' in middle life. Educated for the Dissenting ministry,

Defoe, a man of inexhaustible practical energy, engaged instead in several

successive lines of business, and at the age of thirty-five, after various

vicissitudes, was in prosperous circumstances. He now became a pamphleteer

in support of King William and the Whigs. His first very significant work,

a satire against the High-Church Tories entitled 'The Shortest Way with

Dissenters,' belongs early in the reign of Queen Anne. Here, parodying

extreme Tory bigotry, he argued, with apparent seriousness, that the

Dissenters should all be hanged. The Tories were at first delighted, but

when they discovered the hoax became correspondingly indignant and Defoe

was set in the pillory, and (for a short time) imprisoned. In this

confinement he began _The Review_, a newspaper which he continued for

eleven years and whose department called 'The Scandal Club' suggested 'The

Tatler' to Steele. During many years following his release Defoe issued an

enormous number of pamphlets and acted continuously as a secret agent and

spy of the government. Though he was always at heart a thorough-going

Dissenter and Whig, he served all the successive governments, Whig and

Tory, alike; for his character and point of view were those of the

'practical' journalist and middle-class money-getter. This of course means

that all his professed principles were superficial, or at least secondary,

that he was destitute of real religious feeling and of the gentleman's

sense of honor.

Defoe's influence in helping to shape modern journalism and modern

every-day English style was large; but the achievement which has given him

world-wide fame came late in life. In 1706 he had written a masterly short

story, 'The Apparition of Mrs. Veal.' Its real purpose, characteristically

enough, was the concealed one of promoting the sale of an unsuccessful

religious book, but its literary importance lies first in the

extraordinarily convincing mass of minute details which it casts about an

incredible incident and second in the complete knowledge (sprung from

Defoe's wide experience in journalism, politics, and business) which it

displays of a certain range of middle-class characters and ideas. It is

these same elements, together with the vigorous presentation and emphasis

of basal practical virtues, that distinguished 'Robinson Crusoe,' of which

the First Part appeared in 1719, when Defoe was nearly or quite sixty years

of age. The book, which must have been somewhat influenced by 'Pilgrim's

Progress,' was more directly suggested by a passage in William Dampier's

'Voyage Round the World,' and also, as every one knows, by the experience

of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who, set ashore on the island of Juan

Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, had lived there alone from 1709 to 1713.

Selkirk's story had been briefly told in the year of his return in a

newspaper of Steele, 'The Englishman'; it was later to inspire the most

famous poem of William Cowper. 'Robinson Crusoe,' however, turned the

material to account in a much larger, more clever, and more striking

fashion. Its success was immediate and enormous, both with the English

middle class and with a wider circle of readers in the other European

countries; it was followed by numerous imitations and it will doubtless

always continue to be one of the best known of world classics. The precise

elements of its power can be briefly indicated. As a story of unprecedented

adventure in a distant and unknown region it speaks thrillingly to the

universal human sense of romance. Yet it makes a still stronger appeal to

the instinct for practical, every-day realism which is the controlling

quality in the English dissenting middle class for whom Defoe was writing.

Defoe has put himself with astonishingly complete dramatic sympathy into

the place of his hero. In spite of not a few errors and oversights (due to

hasty composition) in the minor details of external fact, he has virtually

lived Crusoe's life with him in imagination and he therefore makes the

reader also pass with Crusoe through all his experiences, his fears, hopes

and doubts. Here also, as we have implied, Defoe's vivid sense for external

minutiae plays an important part. He tells precisely how many guns and

cheeses and flasks of spirit Crusoe brought away from the wreck, how many

days or weeks he spent in making his earthen vessels and his canoe--in a

word, thoroughly actualizes the whole story. More than this, the book

strikes home to the English middle class because it records how a plain

Englishman completely mastered apparently insuperable obstacles through the

plain virtues of courage, patience, perseverance, and mechanical ingenuity.

Further, it directly addresses the dissenting conscience in its emphasis on

religion and morality. This is none the less true because the religion and

morality are of the shallow sort characteristic of Defoe, a man who, like

Crusoe, would have had no scruples about selling into slavery a

dark-skinned boy who had helped him to escape from the same condition. Of

any really delicate or poetic feeling, any appreciation for the finer

things of life, the book has no suggestion. In style, like Defoe's other

writings, it is straightforward and clear, though colloquially informal,

with an entire absence of pretense or affectation. Structurally, it is a

characteristic story of adventure--a series of loosely connected

experiences not unified into an organic plot, and with no stress on

character and little treatment of the really complex relations and

struggles between opposing characters and groups of characters. Yet it

certainly marks a step in the development of the modern novel, as will be

indicated in the proper place (below, p. 254).

Defoe's energy had not diminished with age and a hard life, and the success

of 'Robinson Crusoe' led him to pour out a series of other works of

romantic-realistic fiction. The second part of 'Robinson Crusoe' is no more

satisfactory than any other similar continuation, and the third part, a

collection of moralizings, is today entirely and properly forgotten. On the

other hand, his usual method, the remarkable imaginative re-creation and

vivifying of a host of minute details, makes of the fictitious 'Journal of

the Plague Year' (1666) a piece of virtual history. Defoe's other later

works are rather unworthy attempts to make profit out of his reputation and

his full knowledge of the worst aspects of life; they are mostly very frank

presentations of the careers of adventurers or criminals, real or

fictitious. In this coarse realism they are picaresque (above, p. 108), and

in structure also they, like 'Robinson Crusoe,' are picaresque in being

mere successions of adventures without artistic plot.

In Defoe's last years he suffered a great reverse of fortune, paying the

full penalty for his opportunism and lack of ideals. His secret and

unworthy long-standing connection with the Government was disclosed, so

that his reputation was sadly blemished, and he seems to have gone into

hiding, perhaps as the result of half-insane delusions. He died in 1731.

His place in English literature is secure, though he owes it to the lucky

accident of finding not quite too late special material exactly suited to

his peculiar talent.

JONATHAN SWIFT. Jonathan Swift, another unique figure of very mixed traits,

is like Defoe in that he connects the reign of William III with that of his

successors and that, in accordance with the spirit of his age, he wrote for

the most part not for literary but for practical purposes; in many other

respects the two are widely different. Swift is one of the best

representatives in English literature of sheer intellectual power, but his

character, his aims, his environment, and the circumstances of his life

denied to him also literary achievement of the greatest permanent

significance. Swift, though of unmixed English descent, related to both

Dryden and Robert Herrick, was born in Ireland, in 1667. Brought up in

poverty by his widowed mother, he spent the period between his fourteenth

and twentieth years recklessly and without distinction at Trinity College,

Dublin. From the outbreak attending the Revolution of 1688 he fled to

England, where for the greater part of nine years he lived in the country

as a sort of secretary to the retired statesman, Sir William Temple, who

was his distant relative by marriage. Here he had plenty of time for

reading, but the position of dependence and the consciousness that his

great though still unformed powers of intellect and of action were rusting

away in obscurity undoubtedly did much to increase the natural bitterness

of his disposition. As the result of a quarrel he left Temple for a time

and took holy orders, and on the death of Temple he returned to Ireland as

chaplain to the English Lord Deputy. He was eventually given several small

livings and other church positions in and near Dublin, and at one of these,

Laracor, he made his home for another nine years. During all this period

and later the Miss Esther Johnson whom he has immortalized as 'Stella'

holds a prominent place in his life. A girl of technically gentle birth,

she also had been a member of Sir William Temple's household, was

infatuated with Swift, and followed him to Ireland. About their intimacy

there has always hung a mystery. It has been held that after many years

they were secretly married, but this is probably a mistake; the essential

fact seems to be that Swift, with characteristic selfishness, was willing

to sacrifice any other possible prospects of 'Stella' to his own mere

enjoyment of her society. It is certain, however, that he both highly

esteemed her and reciprocated her affection so far as it was possible for

him to love any woman.

In 1704 Swift published his first important works (written earlier, while

he was living with Temple), which are among the masterpieces of his

satirical genius. In 'The Battle of the Books' he supports Temple, who had

taken the side of the Ancients in a hotly-debated and very futile quarrel

then being carried on by French and English writers as to whether ancient

or modern authors are the greater. 'The Tale of a Tub' is a keen, coarse,

and violent satire on the actual irreligion of all Christian Churches. It

takes the form of a burlesque history of three brothers, Peter (the

Catholics, so called from St. Peter), Martin (the Lutherans and the Church

of England, named from Martin Luther), and Jack (the Dissenters, who

followed John Calvin); but a great part of the book is made up of

irrelevant introductions and digressions in which Swift ridicules various

absurdities, literary and otherwise, among them the very practice of

digressions.

Swift's instinctive dominating impulse was personal ambition, and during

this period he made long visits to London, attempting to push his fortunes

with the Whig statesmen, who were then growing in power; attempting, that

is, to secure a higher position in the Church; also, be it added, to get

relief for the ill-treated English Church in Ireland. He made the

friendship of Addison, who called him, perhaps rightly, 'the greatest

genius of the age,' and of Steele, but he failed of his main purposes; and

when in 1710 the Tories replaced the Whigs he accepted their solicitations

and devoted his pen, already somewhat experienced in pamphleteering, to

their service. It should not be overlooked that up to this time, when he

was already more than forty years of age, his life had been one of

continual disappointment, so that he was already greatly soured. Now, in

conducting a paper, 'The Examiner,' and in writing masterly political

pamphlets, he found occupation for his tremendous energy and gave very

vital help to the ministers. During the four years of their control of the

government he remained in London on intimate terms with them, especially

with Bolingbroke and Harley, exercising a very large advisory share in the

bestowal of places of all sorts and in the general conduct of affairs. This

was Swift's proper sphere; in the realization and exercise of power he took

a fierce and deep delight. His bearing at this time too largely reflected

the less pleasant side of his nature, especially his pride and arrogance.

Yet toward professed inferiors he could be kind; and real playfulness and

tenderness, little evident in most of his other writings, distinguish his

'Journal to Stella,' which he wrote for her with affectionate regularity,

generally every day, for nearly three years. The 'Journal' is interesting

also for its record of the minor details of the life of Swift and of London

in his day. His association, first and last, with literary men was

unusually broad; when politics estranged him from Steele and Addison he

drew close to Pope and other Tory writers in what they called the

Scriblérus Club.

Despite his political success, Swift was still unable to secure the

definite object of his ambition, a bishopric in England, since the levity

with which he had treated holy things in 'A Tale of a Tub' had hopelessly

prejudiced Queen Anne against him and the ministers could not act

altogether in opposition to her wishes. In 1713 he received the unwelcome

gift of the deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and the next

year, when the Queen died and the Tory ministry fell, he withdrew to

Dublin, as he himself bitterly said, 'to die like a poisoned rat in a

hole.'

In Swift's personal life there were now events in which he again showed to

very little advantage. In London he had become acquainted with a certain

Hester Vanhomrigh, the 'Vanessa' of his longest poem, 'Cadenus and Vanessa'

(in which 'Cadenus' is an anagram of 'Decanus,' Latin for 'Dean,' i. e.,

Swift). Miss Vanhomrigh, like 'Stella,' was infatuated with Swift, and like

her followed him to Ireland, and for nine years, as has been said, he

'lived a double life' between the two. 'Vanessa' then died, probably of a

broken heart, and 'Stella' a few years later. Over against this conduct, so

far as it goes, may be set Swift's quixotic but extensive and constant

personal benevolence and generosity to the poor.

In general, this last period of Swift's life amounted to thirty years of

increasing bitterness. He devoted some of his very numerous pamphlets to

defending the Irish, and especially the English who formed the governing

class in Ireland, against oppression by England. Most important here were

'The Drapier's [i.e., Draper's, Cloth-Merchant's] Letters,' in which Swift

aroused the country to successful resistance against a very unprincipled

piece of political jobbery whereby a certain Englishman was to be allowed

to issue a debased copper coinage at enormous profit to himself but to the

certain disaster of Ireland. 'A Modest Proposal,' the proposal, namely,

that the misery of the poor in Ireland should be alleviated by the raising

of children for food, like pigs, is one of the most powerful, as well as

one of the most horrible, satires which ever issued from any human

imagination. In 1726 (seven years after 'Robinson Crusoe') appeared Swift's

masterpiece, the only one of his works still widely known, namely, 'The

Travels of Lemuel Gulliver.' The remarkable power of this unique work lies

partly in its perfect combination of two apparently inconsistent things,

first, a story of marvelous adventure which must always remain (in the

first parts) one of the most popular of children's classics; and second, a

bitter satire against mankind. The intensity of the satire increases as the

work proceeds. In the first voyage, that to the Lilliputians, the tone is

one mainly of humorous irony; but in such passages as the hideous

description of the _Struldbrugs_ in the third voyage the cynical

contempt is unspeakably painful, and from the distorted libel on mankind in

the _Yahoos_ of the fourth voyage a reader recoils in indignant

disgust.

During these years Swift corresponded with friends in England, among them

Pope, whom he bitterly urged to 'lash the world for his sake,' and he once

or twice visited England in the hope, even then, of securing a place in the

Church on the English side of St. George's Channel. His last years were

melancholy in the extreme. Long before, on noticing a dying tree, he had

observed, with the pitiless incisiveness which would spare neither others

nor himself: 'I am like that. I shall die first at the top.' His birthday

he was accustomed to celebrate with lamentations. At length an obscure

disease which had always afflicted him, fed in part, no doubt, by his fiery

spirit and his fiery discontent, reached his brain. After some years of

increasing lethargy and imbecility, occasionally varied by fits of violent

madness and terrible pain, he died in 1745, leaving all his money to found

a hospital for the insane. His grave in St. Patrick's Cathedral bears this

inscription of his own composing, the best possible epitome of his career:

'Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit' (Where fierce

indignation can no longer tear his heart).

The complexity of Swift's character and the great difference between the

viewpoints of his age and of ours make it easy at the present time to judge

him with too great harshness. Apart from his selfish egotism and his

bitterness, his nature was genuinely loyal, kind and tender to friends and

connections; and he hated injustice and the more flagrant kinds of

hypocrisy with a sincere and irrepressible violence. Whimsicalness and a

contemptuous sort of humor were as characteristic of him as biting sarcasm,

and his conduct and writings often veered rapidly from the one to the other

in a way puzzling to one who does not understand him. Nevertheless he was

dominated by cold intellect and an instinct for the practical. To show

sentiment, except under cover, he regarded as a weakness, and it is said

that when he was unable to control it he would retire from observation. He

was ready to serve mankind to the utmost of his power when effort seemed to

him of any avail, and at times he sacrificed even his ambition to his

convictions; but he had decided that the mass of men were hopelessly

foolish, corrupt, and inferior, personal sympathy with them was impossible

to him, and his contempt often took the form of sardonic practical jokes,

practised sometimes on a whole city. Says Sir Leslie Stephen in his life of

Swift: 'His doctrine was that virtue is the one thing which deserves love

and admiration, and yet that virtue in this hideous chaos of a world

involves misery and decay.' Of his extreme arrogance and brutality to those

who offended him there are numerous anecdotes; not least in the case of

women, whom he, like most men of his age, regarded as man's inferiors. He

once drove a lady from her own parlor in tears by violent insistence that

she should sing, against her will, and when he next met her, inquired,

'Pray, madam, are you as proud and ill-natured to-day as when I saw you

last?' It seems, indeed, that throughout his life Swift's mind was

positively abnormal, and this may help to excuse the repulsive elements in

his writings. For metaphysics and abstract principles, it may be added, he

had a bigoted antipathy. In religion he was a staunch and sincere High

Churchman, but it was according to the formal fashion of many thinkers of

his day; he looked on the Church not as a medium of spiritual life, of

which he, like his generation, had little conception, but as one of the

organized institutions of society, useful in maintaining decency and order.

Swift's 'poems' require only passing notice. In any strict sense they are

not poems at all, since they are entirely bare of imagination, delicacy,

and beauty. Instead they exhibit the typical pseudo-classical traits of

matter-of-factness and clearness; also, as Swift's personal notes,

cleverness, directness, trenchant intellectual power, irony, and entire

ease, to which latter the prevailing octosyllabic couplet meter

contributes. This is the meter of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso,' and the

contrast between these poems and Swift's is instructive.

Swift's prose style has substantially the same qualities. Writing generally

as a man of affairs, for practical ends, he makes no attempt at elegance

and is informal even to the appearance of looseness of expression. Of

conscious refinements and also, in his stories, of technical artistic

structural devices, he has no knowledge; he does not go out of the straight

path in order to create suspense, he does not always explain difficulties

of detail, and sometimes his narrative becomes crudely bare. He often

displays the greatest imaginative power, but it is always a practical

imagination; his similes, for example, are always from very matter-of-fact

things. But more notable are his positive merits. He is always absolutely

clear, direct, and intellectually forceful; in exposition and argument he

is cumulatively irresistible; in description and narration realistically

picturesque and fascinating; and he has the natural instinct for narration

which gives vigorous movement and climax. Indignation and contempt often

make his style burn with passion, and humor, fierce or bitterly mirthful,

often enlivens it with startling flashes.

The great range of the satires which make the greater part of Swift's work

is supported in part by variety of satiric method. Sometimes he pours out a

savage direct attack. Sometimes, in a long ironical statement, he says

exactly the opposite of what he really means to suggest. Sometimes he uses

apparently logical reasoning where either, as in 'A Modest Proposal,' the

proposition, or, as in the 'Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,' the

arguments are absurd. He often shoots out incidental humorous or satirical

shafts. But his most important and extended method is that of allegory. The

pigmy size of the Lilliputians symbolizes the littleness of mankind and

their interests; the superior skill in rope-dancing which with them is the

ground for political advancement, the political intrigues of real men; and

the question whether eggs shall be broken on the big or the little end,

which has embroiled Lilliput in a bloody war, both civil and foreign, the

trivial causes of European conflicts. In Brobdingnag, on the other hand,

the coarseness of mankind is exhibited by the magnifying process. Swift,

like Defoe, generally increases the verisimilitude of his fictions and his

ironies by careful accuracy in details, which is sometimes arithmetically

genuine, sometimes only a hoax. In Lilliput all the dimensions are

scientifically computed on a scale one-twelfth as large as that of man; in

Brobdingnag, by an exact reversal, everything is twelve times greater than

among men. But the long list of technical nautical terms which seem to make

a spirited narrative at the beginning of the second of Gulliver's voyages

is merely an incoherent hodge-podge.

Swift, then, is the greatest of English satirists and the only one who as a

satirist claims large attention in a brief general survey of English

literature. He is one of the most powerfully intellectual of all English

writers, and the clear force of his work is admirable; but being first a

man of affairs and only secondarily a man of letters, he stands only on the

outskirts of real literature. In his character the elements were greatly

mingled, and in our final judgment of him there must be combined something

of disgust, something of admiration, and not a little of sympathy and pity.

STEELE AND ADDISON AND 'THE TATLER' AND 'THE SPECTATOR' The writings of

Steele and Addison, of which the most important are their essays in 'The

Tatler' and 'The Spectator,' contrast strongly with the work of Swift and

are more broadly characteristic of the pseudo-classical period.

Richard Steele was born in Dublin in 1672 of an English father and an Irish

mother. The Irish strain was conspicuous throughout his life in his

warm-heartedness, impulsiveness and lack of self-control and practical

judgment. Having lost his father early, he was sent to the Charterhouse

School in London, where he made the acquaintance of Addison, and then to

Oxford. He abandoned the university to enlist in the aristocratic regiment

of Life Guards, and he remained in the army, apparently, for seven or eight

years, though he seems not to have been in active service and became a

recognized wit at the London coffee-houses. Thackeray in 'Henry Esmond'

gives interesting though freely imaginative pictures of him at this stage

of his career and later. His reckless instincts and love of pleasure were

rather strangely combined with a sincere theoretical devotion to religion,

and his first noticeable work (1701), a little booklet called 'The

Christian Hero,' aimed, in opposition to fashionable license, to show that

decency and goodness are requisites of a real gentleman. The resultant

ridicule forced him into a duel (in which he seriously wounded his

antagonist), and thenceforth in his writings duelling was a main object of

his attacks. During the next few years he turned with the same reforming

zeal to comedy, where he attempted to exalt pure love and high ideals,

though the standards of his age and class leave in his own plays much that

to-day seems coarse. Otherwise his plays are by no means great; they

initiated the weak 'Sentimental Comedy,' which largely dominated the

English stage for the rest of the century. During this period Steele was

married twice in rather rapid succession to wealthy ladies whose fortunes

served only very temporarily to respite him from his chronic condition of

debt and bailiff's duns.

Now succeeds the brief period of his main literary achievement. All his

life a strong Whig, he was appointed in 1707 Gazetteer, or editor, of 'The

London Gazette,' the official government newspaper. This led him in 1709 to

start 'The Tatler.' English periodical literature, in forms which must be

called the germs both of the modern newspaper and of the modern magazine,

had begun in an uncertain fashion, of which the details are too complicated

for record here, nearly a hundred years before, and had continued ever

since with increasing vigor. The lapsing of the licensing laws in 1695 had

given a special impetus. Defoe's 'Review,' from 1704 to 1713, was devoted

to many interests, including politics, the Church and commerce. Steele's

'Tatler' at first likewise dealt in each number with several subjects, such

as foreign news, literary criticism, and morals, but his controlling

instinct to inculcate virtue and good sense more and more asserted itself.

The various departments were dated from the respective coffee-houses where

those subjects were chiefly discussed, Poetry from 'Will's,' Foreign and

Domestic News from 'St. James's,' and so on. The more didactic papers were

ascribed to an imaginary Isaac Bickerstaff, a nom-de-plume which Steele

borrowed from some of Swift's satires. Steele himself wrote two-thirds of

all the papers, but before proceeding far he accepted Addison's offer of

assistance and later he occasionally called in other contributors.

'The Tatler' appeared three times a week and ran for twenty-one months; it

came to an end shortly after the return of the Tories to power had deprived

Steele and Addison of some of their political offices. Its discontinuance

may have been due to weariness on Steele's part or, since it was Whig in

tone, to a desire to be done with partisan writing; at any rate, two months

later, in March, 1711, of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim, secured the

favor of the ministers of the day, and throughout almost all the rest of

his life he held important political places, some even, thanks to Swift,

during the period of Tory dominance. During his last ten years he was a

member of Parliament; but though he was a delightful conversationalist in a

small group of friends, he was unable to speak in public.

Addison's great fame as 'The Spectator' was increased when in 1713 he

brought out the play 'Cato,' mostly written years before. This is a

characteristic example of the pseudo-classical tragedies of which a few

were produced during the first half of the eighteenth century. They are the

stiffest and most lifeless of all forms of pseudo-classical literature;

Addison, for his part, attempts not only to observe the three unities, but

to follow many of the minor formal rules drawn up by the French critics,

and his plot, characterization, and language are alike excessively pale and

frigid. Paleness and frigidity, however, were taken for beauties at the

time, and the moral idea of the play, the eulogy of Cato's devotion to

liberty in his opposition to Caesar, was very much in accord with the

prevailing taste, or at least the prevailing affected taste. Both political

parties loudly claimed the work as an expression of their principles, the

Whigs discovering in Caesar an embodiment of arbitrary government like that

of the Tories, the Tories declaring him a counterpart of Marlborough, a

dangerous plotter, endeavoring to establish a military despotism. 'Cato,'

further, was a main cause of a famous quarrel between Addison and Pope.

Addison, now recognized as the literary dictator of the age, had greatly

pleased Pope, then a young aspirant for fame, by praising his 'Essay on

Criticism,' and Pope rendered considerable help in the final revision of

'Cato.' When John Dennis, a rather clumsy critic, attacked the play, Pope

came to its defense with a reply written in a spirit of railing bitterness

which sprang from injuries of his own. Addison, a real gentleman, disowned

the defense, and this, with other slights suffered or imagined by Pope's

jealous disposition, led to estrangement and soon to the composition of

Pope's very clever and telling satire on Addison as 'Atticus,' which Pope

did not publish, however, until he included it in his 'Epistle to Dr.

Arbuthnot,' many years after Addison's death.

The few remaining years of Addison's life were rather unhappy. He married

the widowed Countess of Warwick and attained a place in the Ministry as one

of the Secretaries of State; but his marriage was perhaps incompatible and

his quarrel with Steele was regrettable. He died in 1719 at the age of only

forty-seven, perhaps the most generally respected and beloved man of his

time. On his deathbed, with a somewhat self-conscious virtue characteristic

both of himself and of the period, he called his stepson to come and 'see

in what peace a Christian could die.'

'The Tatler' and the more important 'Spectator' accomplished two results of

main importance: they developed the modern essay as a comprehensive and

fluent discussion of topics of current interest; and they performed a very

great service in elevating the tone of English thought and life. The later

'Tatlers' and all the 'Spectators' dealt, by diverse methods, with a great

range of themes--amusements, religion, literature, art, dress, clubs,

superstitions, and in general all the fashions and follies of the time. The

writers, especially Addison, with his wide and mature scholarship, aimed to

form public taste. But the chief purpose of the papers, professedly, was

'to banish Vice and Ignorance' (though here also, especially in Steele's

papers, the tone sometimes seems to twentieth-century readers far from

unexceptionable). When the papers began to appear, in spite of some

weakening of the Restoration spirit, the idea still dominated, or was

allowed to appear dominant, that immorality and lawlessness were the proper

marks of a gentleman. The influence of the papers is thus summarized by the

poet Gray: 'It would have been a jest, some time since, for a man to have

asserted that anything witty could be said in praise of a married state or

that Devotion and Virtue were in any way necessary to the character of a

fine gentleman.... Instead of complying with the false sentiments or

vicious tastes of the age he [Steele] has boldly assured them that they

were altogether in the wrong.... It is incredible to conceive the effect

his writings have had upon the Town; how many thousand follies they have

either quite banished or given a very great check to! how much countenance

they have added to Virtue and Religion! how many people they have rendered

happy by showing them it was their own faults if they were not so.'

An appeal was made, also, to women no less than to men. During the previous

period woman, in fashionable circles, had been treated as an elegant toy,

of whom nothing was expected but to be frivolously attractive. Addison and

Steele held up to her the ideal of self-respecting intellectual development

and of reasonable preparation for her own particular sphere.

The great effectiveness of 'The Spectator's' preaching was due largely to

its tactfulness. The method was never violent denunciation, rather gentle

admonition, suggestion by example or otherwise, and light or humorous

raillery. Indeed, this almost uniform urbanity and good-nature makes the

chief charm of the papers. Their success was largely furthered, also, by

the audience provided in the coffee-houses, virtually eighteenth century

middle-class clubs whose members and points of view they primarily

addressed.

The external style has been from the first an object of unqualified and

well-merited praise. Both the chief authors are direct, sincere, and

lifelike, and the many short sentences which they mingle with the longer,

balanced, ones give point and force. Steele is on the whole somewhat more

colloquial and less finished, Addison more balanced and polished, though

without artificial formality. Dr. Johnson's repeatedly quoted description

of the style can scarcely be improved on--'familiar but not coarse, and

elegant but not ostentatious.'

It still remains to speak of one particular achievement of 'The Spectator,'

namely the development of the character-sketch, accomplished by means of

the series of De Coverly papers, scattered at intervals among the others.

This was important because it signified preparation for the modern novel

with its attention to character as well as action. The character-sketch as

a distinct form began with the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, of the

third century B. C., who struck off with great skill brief humorous

pictures of typical figures--the Dissembler, the Flatterer, the Coward, and

so on. This sort of writing, in one form or another, was popular in France

and England in the seventeenth century. From it Steele, and following him

Addison, really derived the idea for their portraits of Sir Roger, Will

Honeycomb, Will Wimble, and the other members of the De Coverly group; but

in each case they added individuality to the type traits. Students should

consider how complete the resulting characterizations are, and in general

just what additions and changes in all respects would be needed to

transform the De Coverly papers into a novel of the nineteenth century

type.

ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744. The chief representative of pseudo-classicism in

its most particular field, that of poetry, is Dryden's successor, Alexander

Pope.

Pope was born in 1688 (just a hundred years before Byron), the son of a

Catholic linen-merchant in London. Scarcely any other great writer has ever

had to contend against such hard and cruel handicaps as he. He inherited a

deformed and dwarfed body and an incurably sickly constitution, which

carried with it abnormal sensitiveness of both nerves and mind. Though he

never had really definite religious convictions of his own, he remained all

his life formally loyal to his parents' faith, and under the laws of the

time this closed to him all the usual careers of a gentleman. But he was

predestined by Nature to be a poet. Brought up chiefly at the country home

near Windsor to which his father had retired, and left to himself for

mental training, he never acquired any thoroughness of knowledge or power

of systematic thought, but he read eagerly the poetry of many languages. He

was one of the most precocious of the long list of precocious versifiers;

his own words are: 'I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.' The

influences which would no doubt have determined his style in any case were

early brought to a focus in the advice given him by an amateur poet and

critic, William Walsh. Walsh declared that England had had great poets,

'but never one great poet that was correct' (that is of thoroughly regular

style). Pope accepted this hint as his guiding principle and proceeded to

seek correctness by giving still further polish to the pentameter couplet

of Dryden.

At the age of twenty-one, when he was already on familiar terms with

prominent literary men, he published some imitative pastorals, and two

years later his 'Essay on Criticism.' This work is thoroughly

representative both of Pope and of his period. In the first place the

subject is properly one not for poetry but for expository prose. In the

second place the substance is not original with Pope but is a restatement

of the ideas of the Greek Aristotle, the Roman Horace, especially of the

French critic Boileau, who was Pope's earlier contemporary, and of various

other critical authorities, French and English. But in terse and

epigrammatic expression of fundamental or pseudo-classical principles of

poetic composition and criticism the 'Essay' is amazingly brilliant, and it

shows Pope already a consummate master of the couplet. The reputation which

it brought him was very properly increased by the publication the next year

of the admirable mock-epic 'The Rape of the Lock,' which Pope soon

improved, against Addison's advice, by the delightful 'machinery' of the

Rosicrucian sylphs. In its adaptation of means to ends and its attainment

of its ends Lowell has boldly called this the most successful poem in

English. Pope now formed his lifelong friendship with Swift (who was twice

his age), with Bolingbroke, and other distinguished persons, and at

twenty-five or twenty-six found himself acknowledged as the chief man of

letters in England, with a wide European reputation.

For the next dozen years he occupied himself chiefly with the formidable

task (suggested, no doubt, by Dryden's 'Virgil,' but expressive also of the

age) of translating 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey.' 'The Iliad' he completed

unaided, but then, tiring of the drudgery, he turned over half of 'The

Odyssey' to two minor writers. So easy, however, was his style to catch

that if the facts were not on record the work of his assistants would

generally be indistinguishable from his own. From an absolute point of view

many criticisms must be made of Pope's version. That he knew little Greek

when he began the work and from first to last depended much on translations

would in itself have made his rendering inaccurate. Moreover, the noble but

direct and simple spirit and language of Homer were as different as

possible from the spirit and language of the London drawing-rooms for which

Pope wrote; hence he not only expands, as every author of a

verse-translation must do in filling out his lines, but inserts new ideas

of his own and continually substitutes for Homer's expressions the

periphrastic and, as he held, elegant ones of the pseudo-classic diction.

The polished rimed couplet, also, pleasing as its precision and smoothness

are for a while, becomes eventually monotonous to most readers of a

romantic period. Equally serious is the inability which Pope shared with

most of the men of his time to understand the culture of the still

half-barbarous Homeric age. He supposes (in his Preface) that it was by a

deliberate literary artifice that Homer introduced the gods into his

action, supposes, that is, that Homer no more believed in the Greek gods

than did he, Pope, himself; and in general Pope largely obliterates the

differences between the Homeric warrior-chief and the eighteenth century

gentleman. The force of all this may be realized by comparing Pope's

translation with the very sympathetic and skilful one made (in prose) in

our own time by Messrs. Lang, Leaf, and Myers. A criticism of Pope's work

which Pope never forgave but which is final in some aspects was made by the

great Cambridge professor, Bentley: 'It's a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you

must not call it Homer.' Yet after all, Pope merited much higher praise

than this, and his work was really, a great achievement. It has been truly

said that every age must have the great classics translated into its own

dialect, and this work could scarcely have been better done for the early

eighteenth century than it is done by Pope.

The publication of Pope's Homer marks an important stage in the development

of authorship. Until the time of Dryden no writer had expected to earn his

whole living by publishing works of real literature. The medieval minstrels

and romancers of the higher class and the dramatists of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries had indeed supported themselves largely or wholly by

their works, but not by printing them. When, in Dryden's time, with the

great enlargement of the reading public, conditions were about to change,

the publisher took the upper hand; authors might sometimes receive gifts

from the noblemen to whom they inscribed dedications, but for their main

returns they must generally sell their works outright to the publisher and

accept his price. Pope's 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' afforded the first notably

successful instance of another method, that of publication by

subscription--individual purchasers at a generous price being secured

beforehand by solicitation and in acknowledgment having their names printed

in a conspicuous list in the front of the book. From the two Homeric poems

together, thanks to this device, Pope realized a profit of nearly £9000,

and thus proved that an author might be independent of the publisher. On

the success of 'The Iliad' alone Pope had retired to an estate at a London

suburb, Twickenham (then pronounced 'Twitnam'), where he spent the

remainder of his life. Here he laid out five acres with skill, though in

the formal landscape-garden taste of his time. In particular, he excavated

under the road a 'grotto,' which he adorned with mirrors and glittering

stones and which was considered by his friends, or at least by himself, as

a marvel of artistic beauty.

Only bare mention need here be made of Pope's edition of Shakspere,

prepared with his usual hard work but with inadequate knowledge and

appreciation, and published in 1725. His next production, 'The Dunciad,'

can be understood only in the light of his personal character. Somewhat

like Swift, Pope was loyal and kind to his friends and inoffensive to

persons against whom he did not conceive a prejudice. He was an unusually

faithful son, and, in a brutal age, a hater of physical brutality. But, as

we have said, his infirmities and hardships had sadly warped his

disposition and he himself spoke of 'that long disease, my life.' He was

proud, vain, abnormally sensitive, suspicious, quick to imagine an injury,

incredibly spiteful, implacable in resentment, apparently devoid of any

sense of honesty--at his worst hateful and petty-minded beyond any other

man in English literature. His trickiness was astonishing. Dr. Johnson

observes that he 'hardly drank tea without a stratagem,' and indeed he

seems to have been almost constitutionally unable to do anything in an open

and straightforward way. Wishing, for example, to publish his

correspondence, he not only falsified it, but to preserve an appearance of

modesty engaged in a remarkably complicated series of intrigues by which he

trapped a publisher into apparently stealing a part of it--and then loudly

protested at the theft and the publication. It is easy to understand,

therefore, that Pope was readily drawn into quarrels and was not an

agreeable antagonist. He had early taken a violent antipathy to the host of

poor scribblers who are known by the name of the residence of most of them,

Grub Street--an antipathy chiefly based, it would seem, on his contempt for

their worldly and intellectual poverty. For some years he had been carrying

on a pamphlet war against them, and now, it appears, he deliberately

stirred them up to make new attacks upon him. Determined, at any rate, to

overwhelm all his enemies at once in a great satire, he bent all his

energies, with the utmost seriousness, to writing 'The Dunciad' on the

model of Dryden's 'Mac Flecknoe' and irresponsibly 'dealt damnation 'round

the land.' Clever and powerful, the poem is still more disgusting--grossly

obscene, pitifully rancorous against scores of insignificant creatures, and

no less violent against some of the ablest men of the time, at whom Pope

happened to have taken offense. Yet throughout the rest of his life Pope

continued with keen delight to work the unsavory production over and to

bring out new editions.

During his last fifteen years Pope's original work was done chiefly in two

very closely related fields, first in a group of what he called 'Moral'

essays, second in the imitation of a few of the Satires and Epistles of

Horace, which Pope applied to circumstances of his own time. In the 'Moral'

Essays he had intended to deal comprehensively with human nature and

institutions, but such a systematic plan was beyond his powers. The longest

of the essays which he accomplished, the 'Essay on Man,' aims, like

'Paradise Lost,' to 'vindicate the ways of God to man,' but as regards

logic chiefly demonstrates the author's inability to reason. He derived the

ideas, in fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an amateur Deist

and optimist of the shallow eighteenth century type, and so far was Pope

from understanding what he was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it

was pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was Deistic rather

than Christian [Footnote: The name Deist was applied rather generally in

the eighteenth century to all persons who did not belong to some recognized

Christian denomination. More strictly, it belongs to those men who

attempted rationalistic criticism of the Bible and wished to go back to

what they supposed to be a primitive pure religion, anterior to revealed

religion and free from the corruptions and formalism of actual

Christianity. The Deistic ideas followed those expressed in the seventeenth

century by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, brother of George Herbert, who held

that the worship due to the Deity consists chiefly in reverence and

virtuous conduct, and also that man should repent of sin and forsake it and

that reward and punishment, both in this life and hereafter, follow from

the goodness and justice of God.] In this poem, as in all Pope's others of

this period, the best things are the detached observations. Some of the

other poems, especially the autobiographical 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,'

are notable for their masterly and venomous satirical sketches of various

contemporary characters.

Pope's physical disabilities brought him to premature old age, and he died

in 1744. His declining years were saddened by the loss of friends, and he

had never married, though his dependent and sensitive nature would have

made marriage especially helpful to him. During the greater part of his

life, however, he was faithfully watched over by a certain Martha Blount,

whose kindness he repaid with only less selfishness than that which

'Stella' endured from Swift. Indeed, Pope's whole attitude toward woman,

which appears clearly in his poetry, was largely that of the Restoration.

Yet after all that must be said against Pope, it is only fair to conclude,

as does his biographer, Sir Leslie Stephen: 'It was a gallant spirit which

got so much work out of this crazy carcase, and kept it going, spite of all

its feebleness, for fifty-six years.'

The question of Pope's rank among authors is of central importance for any

theory of poetry. In his own age he was definitely regarded by his

adherents as the greatest of all English poets of all time. As the

pseudo-classic spirit yielded to the romantic this judgment was modified,

until in the nineteenth century it was rather popular to deny that in any

true sense Pope was a poet at all. Of course the truth lies somewhere

between these extremes. Into the highest region of poetry, that of great

emotion and imagination, Pope scarcely enters at all; he is not a poet in

the same sense as Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, or Browning;

neither his age nor his own nature permitted it. In lyric, original

narrative, and dramatic poetry he accomplished very little, though the

success of his 'Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady' and 'Eloisa to Abelard' must

be carefully weighed in this connection. On the other hand, it may well be

doubted if he can ever be excelled as a master in satire and kindred

semi-prosaic forms. He is supreme in epigrams, the terse statement of pithy

truths; his poems have furnished more brief familiar quotations to our

language than those of any other writer except Shakspere. For this sort of

effect his rimed couplet provided him an unrivalled instrument, and he

especially developed its power in antithesis, very frequently balancing one

line of the couplet, or one half of a line, against the other. He had

received the couplet from Dryden, but he polished it to a greater finish,

emphasizing, on the whole, its character as a single unit by making it more

consistently end-stopped. By this means he gained in snap and point, though

for purposes of continuous narrative or exposition he increased the

monotony and somewhat decreased the strength. Every reader must decide for

himself how far the rimed couplet, in either Dryden's or Pope's use of it,

is a proper medium for real poetry. But it is certain that within the

limits which he laid down for himself, there never was a more finished

artist than Pope. He chooses every word with the greatest care for its

value as both sound and sense; his minor technique is well-night perfect,

except sometimes in the matter of rimes; and in particular the variety

which he secures, partly by skilful shifting of pauses and use of extra

syllables, is remarkable; though it is a variety less forceful than

Dryden's.

[Note: The judgments of certain prominent critics on the poetry of Pope and

of his period may well be considered. Professor Lewis E. Gates has said:

'The special task of the pseudo-classical period was to order, to

systematize, and to name; its favorite methods were, analysis and

generalization. It asked for no new experience. The abstract, the typical,

the general--these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the

specific experience, the vital fact.' Lowell declares that it 'ignored the

imagination altogether and sent Nature about her business as an impertinent

baggage whose household loom competed unlawfully with the machine-made

fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories.'

Still more hostile is Matthew Arnold: 'The difference between genuine

poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly

this: Their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry

is conceived and composed in the soul. The difference is immense.' Taine is

contemptuous: 'Pope did not write because he thought, but thought in order

to write. Inky paper, and the noise it makes in the world, was his idol.'

Professor Henry A. Beers is more judicious: 'Pope did in some inadequate

sense hold the mirror up to Nature.... It was a mirror in a drawing-room,

but it gave back a faithful image of society, powdered and rouged, to be

sure, and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way as the

heroes of Homer in theirs, though not broadly human.'

It should be helpful also to indicate briefly some of the more specific

mannerisms of pseudo-classical poetry, in addition to the general

tendencies named above on page 190. Almost all of them, it will be

observed, result from the habit of generalizing instead of searching for

the pictorial and the particular. 1. There is a constant preference (to

enlarge on what was briefly stated above) for abstract expressions instead

of concrete ones, such expressions as 'immortal powers' or 'Heaven' for

'God.' These abstract expressions are especially noticeable in the

descriptions of emotion, which the pseudo-classical writers often describe

without really feeling it, in such colorless words as 'joys, 'delights,'

and 'ecstasies,' and which they uniformly refer to the conventionalized

'heart, 'soul,' or 'bosom.' Likewise in the case of personal features,

instead of picturing a face with blue eyes, rosy lips, and pretty color,

these poets vaguely mention 'charms,' 'beauties,' 'glories,'

'enchantments,' and the like. These three lines from 'The Rape of the Lock'

are thoroughly characteristic:

The fair [the lady] each moment rises in her charms,

Repairs her smiles, awakens ev'ry grace,

And calls forth all the, wonders of her face.

The tendency reaches its extreme in the frequent use of abstract and often

absurdly pretentious expressions in place of the ordinary ones which to

these poets appeared too simple or vulgar. With them a field is generally a

'verdant mead'; a lock of hair becomes 'The long-contended honours of her

head'; and a boot 'The shining leather that encased the limb.'

2. There is a constant use of generic or generalizing articles, pronouns,

and adjectives, 'the,' 'a,' 'that,' 'every,' and 'each' as in some of the

preceding and in the following examples: 'The wise man's passion and the

vain man's boast.' 'Wind the shrill horn or spread the waving net.' 'To act

a Lover's or a Roman's part.' 'That bleeding bosom.' 3. There is an

excessive use of adjectives, often one to nearly every important noun,

which creates monotony. 4. The vocabulary is largely conventionalized,

with, certain favorite words usurping the place of a full and free variety,

such words as 'conscious,' 'generous, 'soft,' and 'amorous.' The metaphors

employed are largely conventionalized ones, like 'Now burns with glory, and

then melts with love.' 5. The poets imitate the Latin language to some

extent; especially they often prefer long words of Latin origin to short

Saxon ones, and Latin names to English--'Sol' for 'Sun, 'temple' for

'church,' 'Senate' for 'Parliament,' and so on.]

SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784. To the informal position of dictator of English

letters which had been held successively by Dryden, Addison, and Pope,

succeeded in the third quarter of the eighteenth century a man very

different from any of them, one of the most forcefully individual of all

authors, Samuel Johnson. It was his fortune to uphold, largely by the

strength of his personality, the pseudo-classical ideals which Dryden and

Addison had helped to form and whose complete dominance had contributed to

Pope's success, in the period when their authority was being undermined by

the progress of the rising Romantic Movement.

Johnson was born in 1709, the son of a bookseller in Lichfield. He

inherited a constitution of iron, great physical strength, and fearless

self-assertiveness, but also hypochondria (persistent melancholy),

uncouthness of body and movement, and scrofula, which disfigured his face

and greatly injured his eyesight. In his early life as well as later,

spasmodic fits of abnormal mental activity when he 'gorged' books,

especially the classics, as he did food, alternated with other fits of

indolence. The total result, however, was a very thorough knowledge of an

extremely wide range of literature; when he entered Oxford in 1728 the

Master of his college assured him that he was the best qualified applicant

whom he had ever known. Johnson, on his side, was not nearly so well

pleased with the University; he found the teachers incompetent, and his

pride suffered intensely from his poverty, so that he remained at Oxford

little more than a year. The death of his father in 1731 plunged him into a

distressingly painful struggle for existence which lasted for thirty years.

After failing as a subordinate teacher in a boarding-school he became a

hack-writer in Birmingham, where, at the age of twenty-five, he made a

marriage with a widow, Mrs. Porter, an unattractive, rather absurd, but

good-hearted woman of forty-six. He set up a school of his own, where he

had only three pupils, and then in 1737 tramped with one of them, David

Garrick, later the famous actor, to London to try his fortune in another

field. When the two reached the city their combined funds amounted to

sixpence. Sir Robert Walpole, ruling the country with unscrupulous

absolutism, had now put an end to the employment of literary men in public

life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in

imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much

attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that

undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street

writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on

the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even

walking the streets at night for lack of a lodging, Johnson was sometimes

unable to appear at a tavern because he had no respectable clothes. It was

ten years after the appearance of 'London' that he began to emerge, through

the publication of his 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' a poem of the same kind as

'London' but more sincere and very powerful. A little later Garrick, who

had risen very much more rapidly and was now manager of Drury Lane theater,

gave him substantial help by producing his early play 'Irene,' a

representative pseudo-classical tragedy of which it has been said that a

person with a highly developed sense of duty may be able to read it

through.

Meanwhile, by an arrangement with leading booksellers, Johnson had entered

on the largest, and, as it proved, the decisive, work of his life, the

preparation of his 'Dictionary of the English Language.' The earliest

mentionable English dictionary had appeared as far back as 1604,

'containing 3000 hard words ... gathered for the benefit and help of

ladies, gentle women, or any other unskilful persons.' Others had followed;

but none of them was comprehensive or satisfactory. Johnson, planning a far

more thorough work, contracted to do it for £1575--scanty pay for himself

and his copyists, the more so that the task occupied more than twice as

much time as he had expected, over seven years. The result, then, of very

great labor, the 'Dictionary' appeared in 1755. It had distinct

limitations. The knowledge of Johnson's day was not adequate for tracing

the history and etymology of words, and Johnson himself on being asked the

reason for one of his numerous blunders could only reply, with his

characteristic blunt frankness, 'sheer ignorance.' Moreover, he allowed his

strong prejudices to intrude, even though he colored them with humor; for

example in defining 'oats' as 'a grain which in England is generally given

to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' Jesting at himself he

defined 'lexicographer' as 'a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.'

Nevertheless the work, though not creative literature, was a great and

necessary one, and Johnson did it, on the whole, decidedly well. The

'Dictionary,' in successive enlargements, ultimately, though not until

after Johnson's death, became the standard, and it gave him at once the

definite headship of English literary life. Of course, it should be added,

the English language has vastly expanded since his time, and Johnson's

first edition contained only a tithe of the 400,000 words recorded in the

latest edition of Webster (1910).

With the 'Dictionary' is connected one of the best-known incidents in

English literary history. At the outset of the undertaking Johnson exerted

himself to secure the patronage and financial aid of Lord Chesterfield, an

elegant leader of fashion and of fashionable literature. At the time

Chesterfield, not foreseeing the importance of the work, was coldly

indifferent, but shortly before the Dictionary appeared, being better

informed, he attempted to gain a share in the credit by commending it in a

periodical. Johnson responded with a letter which is a perfect masterpiece

of bitter but polished irony and which should be familiar to every student.

The hard labor of the 'Dictionary' had been the only remedy for Johnson's

profound grief at the death of his wife, in 1752; and how intensively he

could apply himself at need he showed again some years later when to pay

his mother's funeral expenses he wrote in the evenings of a single week his

'Rasselas,' which in the guise of an Eastern tale is a series of

philosophical discussions of life.

Great as were Johnson's labors during the eight years of preparation of the

'Dictionary' they made only a part of his activity. For about two years he

earned a living income by carrying on the semi-weekly 'Rambler,' one of the

numerous imitations of 'The Spectator.' He was not so well qualified as

Addison or Steele for this work, but he repeated it some years later in

'The Idler.'

It was not until 1775 that Johnson received from Oxford the degree of LL.D.

which gave him the title of 'Dr.,' now almost inseparable from his name;

but his long battle with poverty had ended on the accession of George III

in 1762, when the ministers, deciding to signalize the new reign by

encouraging men of letters, granted Johnson a pension of £300 for life. In

his Dictionary Johnson had contemptuously defined a pension thus: 'An

allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England, it is

generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to

his country.' This was embarrassing, but Johnson's friends rightly

persuaded him to accept the pension, which he, at least, had certainly

earned by services to society very far from treasonable. However, with the

removal of financial pressure his natural indolence, increased by the

strain of hardships and long-continued over-exertion, asserted itself in

spite of his self-reproaches and frequent vows of amendment. Henceforth he

wrote comparatively little but gave expression to his ideas in

conversation, where his genius always showed most brilliantly. At the

tavern meetings of 'The Club' (commonly referred to as 'The Literary

Club'), of which Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and others,

were members, he reigned unquestioned conversational monarch. Here or in

other taverns with fewer friends he spent most of his nights, talking and

drinking incredible quantities of tea, and going home in the small hours to

lie abed until noon.

But occasionally even yet he aroused himself to effort. In 1765 appeared

his long-promised edition of Shakspere. It displays in places much of the

sound sense which is one of Johnson's most distinguishing merits, as in the

terse exposure of the fallacies of the pseudo-classic theory of the three

dramatic unities, and it made some interpretative contributions; but as a

whole it was carelessly and slightly done. Johnson's last important

production, his most important really literary work, was a series of 'Lives

of the English Poets' from the middle of the seventeenth century, which he

wrote for a publishers' collection of their works. The selection of poets

was badly made by the publishers, so that many of the lives deal with very

minor versifiers. Further, Johnson's indolence and prejudices are here

again evident; often when he did not know the facts he did not take the

trouble to investigate; a thorough Tory himself he was often unfair to men

of Whig principles; and for poetry of the delicately imaginative and

romantic sort his rather painfully practical mind had little appreciation.

Nevertheless he was in many respects well fitted for the work, and some of

the lives, such as those of Dryden, Pope, Addison and Swift, men in whom he

took a real interest, are of high merit.

Johnson's last years were rendered gloomy, partly by the loss of friends,

partly by ill-health and a deepening of his lifelong tendency to morbid

depression. He had an almost insane shrinking from death and with it a

pathetic apprehension of future punishment. His melancholy was perhaps the

greater because of the manly courage and contempt for sentimentality which

prevented him from complaining or discussing his distresses. His religious

faith, also, in spite of all intellectual doubts, was strong, and he died

calmly, in 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Johnson's picturesque surface oddities have received undue attention,

thanks largely to his friend and biographer Boswell. Nearly every one

knows, for example, that he superstitiously made a practice of entering

doorways in a certain manner and would rather turn back and come in again

than fail in the observance; that he was careless, even slovenly, in dress

and person, and once remarked frankly that he had no passion for clean

linen; that he ate voraciously, with a half-animal eagerness; that in the

intervals of talking he 'would make odd sounds, a half whistle, or a

clucking like a hen's, and when he ended an argument would blow out his

breath like a whale.' More important were his dogmatism of opinion, his

intense prejudices, and the often seemingly brutal dictatorial violence

with which he enforced them. Yet these things too were really on the

surface. It is true that his nature was extremely conservative; that after

a brief period of youthful free thinking he was fanatically loyal to the

national Church and to the king (though theoretically he was a Jacobite, a

supporter of the supplanted Stuarts as against the reigning House of

Hanover); and that in conversation he was likely to roar down or scowl down

all innovators and their defenders or silence them with such observations

as, 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig.' At worst it was not quite

certain that he would not knock them down physically. Of women's preaching

he curtly observed that it was like a dog walking on its hind legs: 'It is

not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.' English

insular narrowness certainly never had franker expression than in his

exclamation: 'For anything I can see, all foreigners are fools.' For the

American colonists who had presumed to rebel against their king his

bitterness was sometimes almost frenzied; he characterized them as

'rascals, robbers and pirates.' His special antipathy to Scotland and its

people led him to insult them repeatedly, though with some individual Scots

he was on very friendly terms. Yet after all, many of these prejudices

rested on important principles which were among the most solid foundations

of Johnson's nature and largely explain his real greatness, namely on sound

commonsense, moral and intellectual independence, and hatred of

insincerity. There was really something to be said for his refusal to

listen to the Americans' demand for liberty while they themselves held

slaves. Living in a period of change, Johnson perceived that in many cases

innovations prove dangerous and that the progress of society largely

depends on the continuance of the established institutions in which the

wisdom of the past is summed up. Of course in specific instances, perhaps

in the majority of them, Johnson was wrong; but that does not alter the

fact that he thought of himself as standing, and really did stand, for

order against a freedom which is always more or less in danger of leading

to anarchy.

Johnson's personality, too, cannot be fairly judged by its more grotesque

expression. Beneath the rough surface he was a man not only of very

vigorous intellect and great learning, but of sincere piety, a very warm

heart, unusual sympathy and kindness, and the most unselfish, though

eccentric, generosity. Fine ladies were often fascinated by him, and he was

no stranger to good society. On himself, during his later years, he spent

only a third part of his pension, giving away the rest to a small army of

beneficiaries. Some of these persons, through no claim on him but their

need, he had rescued from abject distress and supported in his own house,

where, so far from being grateful, they quarreled among themselves,

complained of the dinner, or even brought their children to live with them.

Johnson himself was sometimes exasperated by their peevishness and even

driven to take refuge from his own home in that 'of his wealthy friends the

Thrales, where, indeed, he had a room of his own; but he never allowed any

one else to criticize or speak harshly of them. In sum, no man was ever

loved or respected more deeply, or with better reason, by those who really

knew him, or more sincerely mourned when he died.

Johnson's importance as a conservative was greatest in his professional

capacity of literary critic and bulwark of pseudo-classicism. In this case,

except that a restraining influence is always salutary to hold a new

movement from extremes, he was in opposition to the time-spirit;

romanticism was destined to a complete triumph because it was the

expression of vital forces which were necessary for the rejuvenation of

literature. Yet it is true that romanticism carried with it much vague and

insincere sentimentality, and it was partly against this that Johnson

protested. Perhaps the twentieth-century mind is most dissatisfied with his

lack of sympathy for the romantic return to an intimate appreciation of

external Nature. Johnson was not blind to the charm of Nature and sometimes

expresses it in his own writing; but for the most part his interest, like

that of his pseudo-classical predecessors, was centered in the world of

man. To him, as he flatly declared, Fleet Street, in the midst of the hurry

of London life, was the most interesting place in the world.

In the substance of his work Johnson is most conspicuously, and of set

purpose, a moralist. In all his writing, so far as the subject permitted,

he aimed chiefly at the inculcation of virtue and the formation of

character. His uncompromising resoluteness in this respect accounts for

much of the dulness which it is useless to try to deny in his work. 'The

Rambler' and 'The Idler' altogether lack Addison's lightness of touch and

of humor; for Johnson, thoroughly Puritan at heart, and dealing generally

with the issues of personal conduct and responsibility, can never greatly

relax his seriousness, while Addison, a man of the world, is content if he

can produce some effect on society as a whole. Again, a present-day reader

can only smile when he finds Johnson in his Preface to Shakspere blaming

the great dramatist for omitting opportunities of instructing and

delighting, as if the best moral teachers were always explicit. But

Johnson's moral and religious earnestness is essentially admirable, the

more so because his deliberate view of the world was thoroughly

pessimistic. His own long and unhappy experience had convinced him that

life is for the most part a painful tribulation, to be endured with as much

patience and courage as possible, under the consciousness of the duty of

doing our best where God has put us and in the hope (though with Johnson

not a confident hope) that we shall find our reward in another world.

It has long been a popular tradition, based largely on a superficial page

of Macaulay, that Johnson's style always represents the extreme of

ponderous pedantry. As usual, the tradition must be largely discounted. It

is evident that Johnson talked, on the whole, better than he wrote, that

the present stimulus of other active minds aroused him to a complete

exertion of his powers, but that in writing, his indolence often allowed

him to compose half sleepily, at a low pressure. In some of his works,

especially 'The Rambler,' where, it has been jocosely suggested, he was

exercising the polysyllables that he wished to put into his 'Dictionary,'

he does employ a stilted Latinized vocabulary and a stilted style, with too

much use of abstract phrases for concrete ones, too many long sentences,

much inverted order, and over-elaborate balance. His style is always in

some respects monotonous, with little use, for instance, as critics have

pointed out, of any form of sentence but the direct declarative, and with

few really imaginative figures of speech. In much of his writing, on the

other hand, the most conspicuous things are power and strong effective

exposition. He often uses short sentences, whether or not in contrast to

his long ones, with full consciousness of their value; when he will take

the trouble, no one can express ideas with clearer and more forceful

brevity; and in a very large part of his work his style carries the finely

tonic qualities of his clear and vigorous mind.

JAMES BOSWELL AND HIS 'LIFE OF JOHNSON.' It is an interesting paradox that

while Johnson's reputation as the chief English man of letters of his age

seems secure for all time, his works, for the most part, do not belong to

the field of pure literature, and, further, have long ceased, almost

altogether, to be read. His reputation is really due to the interest of his

personality, and that is known chiefly by the most famous of all

biographies, the life of him by James Boswell.

Boswell was a Scotch gentleman, born in 1740, the son of a judge who was

also laird of the estate of Auchinleck in Ayrshire, near the English

border. James Boswell studied law, but was never very serious in any

regular activity. Early in life he became possessed by an extreme

boyish-romantic admiration for Johnson's works and through them for their

author, and at last in 1763 (only twenty years before Johnson's death)

secured an introduction to him. Boswell took pains that acquaintance should

soon ripen into intimacy, though it was not until nine years later that he

could be much in Johnson's company. Indeed it appears from Boswell's

account that they were personally together, all told, only during a total

of one hundred and eighty days at intermittent intervals, plus a hundred

more continuously when in 1773 they went on a tour to the Hebrides.

Boswell, however, made a point of recording in minute detail, sometimes on

the spot, all of Johnson's significant conversation to which he listened,

and of collecting with the greatest care his letters and all possible

information about him. He is the founder and still the most thorough

representative of the modern method of accurate biographical writing. After

Johnson's death he continued his researches, refusing to be hurried or

disturbed by several hasty lives of his subject brought out by other

persons, with the result that when his work appeared in 1791 it at once

assumed the position among biographies which it has ever since occupied.

Boswell lived only four years longer, sinking more and more under the habit

of drunkenness which had marred the greater part of his life.

Boswell's character, though absolutely different from Johnson's, was

perhaps as unusual a mixture. He was shallow, extremely vain, often

childishly foolish, and disagreeably jealous of Johnson's other friends.

Only extreme lack of personal dignity can account for the servility of his

attitude toward Johnson and his acceptance of the countless rebuffs from

his idol some of which he himself records and which would have driven any

other man away in indignation. None the less he was good-hearted, and the

other members of Johnson's circle, though they were often vexed by him and

admitted him to 'The Club' only under virtual compulsion by Johnson, seem

on the whole, in the upshot, to have liked him. Certainly it is only by

force of real genius of some sort, never by a mere lucky chance, that a man

achieves the acknowledged masterpiece in any line of work.

Boswell's genius, one is tempted to say, consists partly of his absorption

in the worship of his hero; more largely, no doubt, in his inexhaustible

devotion and patience. If the bulk of his book becomes tiresome to some

readers, it nevertheless gives a picture of unrivalled fulness and

life-likeness. Boswell aimed to be absolutely complete and truthful. When

the excellent Hannah More entreated him to touch lightly on the less

agreeable traits of his subject he replied flatly that he would not cut off

Johnson's claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody. The only very

important qualification to be made is that Boswell was not altogether

capable of appreciating the deeper side of Johnson's nature. It scarcely

needs to be added that Boswell is a real literary artist. He knows how to

emphasize, to secure variety, to bring out dramatic contrasts, and also to

heighten without essentially falsifying, as artists must, giving point and

color to what otherwise would seem thin and pale.

EDWARD GIBBON AND 'THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.' The latter

part of the eighteenth century produced not only the greatest of all

biographies but also the history which can perhaps best claim the same

rank, Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' History of

the modern sort, aiming at minute scientific accuracy through wide

collection of materials and painstaking research, and at vivid reproduction

of the life, situations and characters of the past, had scarcely existed

anywhere, before Gibbon, since classical times. The medieval chroniclers

were mostly mere annalists, brief mechanical recorders of external events,

and the few more philosophic historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries do not attain the first rank. The way was partly prepared for

Gibbon by two Scottish historians, his early contemporaries, the

philosopher David Hume and the clergyman William Robertson, but they have

little of his scientific conscientiousness.

Gibbon, the son of a country gentleman in Surrey, was born in 1737. From

Westminster School he passed at the age of fifteen to Oxford. Ill-health

and the wretched state of instruction at the university made his residence

there, according to his own exaggerated account, largely unprofitable, but

he remained for little more than a year; for, continuing the reading of

theological works, in which he had become interested as a child, he was

converted to Catholicism, and was hurried by his father to the care of a

Protestant pastor in Lausanne, Switzerland. The pastor reconverted him in a

year, but both conversions were merely intellectual, since Gibbon was of

all men the most incapable of spiritual emotion. Later in life he became a

philosophic sceptic. In Lausanne he fell in love with the girl who later

actually married M. Necker, minister of finance under Louis XVI, and became

the mother of the famous Mme. de Staël; but to Gibbon's father a foreign

marriage was as impossible as a foreign religion, and the son, again,

obediently yielded. He never again entertained the thought of marriage. In

his five years of study at Lausanne he worked diligently and laid the broad

foundation of the knowledge of Latin and Greek which was to be

indispensable for his great work. His mature life, spent mostly on his

ancestral estate in England and at a villa which he acquired in Lausanne,

was as externally uneventful as that of most men of letters. He was for

several years a captain in the English militia and later a member of

Parliament and one of the Lords of Trade; all which positions were of

course practically useful to him as a historian. He wrote a brief and

interesting autobiography, which helps to reveal him as sincere and

good-hearted, though cold and somewhat self-conceited, a rather formal man

not of a large nature. He died in 1794.