he enumerates the smells, and describes the horrible results of

overcrowded dwellings; and catalogues the disguises, the weapons, and

the implements of the poacher. There follows the sad story of "The

Miller's Daughter"; and another girl who thus addresses her clerical

rebuker,

Alas! your Reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant,

Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want.

This is a fair example of Crabbe's favourite punning antitheses, like

loose in his gaiters, looser in his gait.

In "The Parish Register" Crabbe reduces the story of a life to the

brevity of an anecdote, and in the dearth of novels his book was very

popular. A better book of a similar scope and aim, in prose, Galt's

"Annals of the Parish," was being written, but, taking time by the

forelock, Crabbe, in 1810, produced "The Borough," descriptions of

a large country town, including tales in verse of more considerable

length. But, in 1804-1805, he had written a poem which is strange in

his work, "Sir Eustace Grey," a tale told by a madman, a record of

the dreams of madness, closely resembling De Quincey's account of the

visions begotten by opium, and, in essence, not unlike Coleridge's

"Pains of Sleep". The metre is that of the French _ballade_, and of the

oldest Scottish ditty on the death of Alexander III. Thus

They hung me on a bough so small,

The rook could build her nest no higher,

They fixed me on the trembling ball

That crowns the steeple's quivering spire;

They set me where the seas retire,

But drown with their returning tide;

And made me flee the mountain's fire

When rolling from its burning side.

This adventure into romance has imaginative merits, and a speed of

movement elsewhere unexampled in the work of Crabbe. The hymn with

which poor Sir Eustace consoles himself might have been written by

Cowper when first converted and "from cells of madness unconfined":--

Pilgrim, burdened with thy sin,

Come the way to Zion's gate;

There, till Mercy let thee in,

Knock and weep, and watch and wait.

Knock! He knows the sinner's cry:

Weep! He loves the mourner's tears:

Watch! for saving grace is nigh:

Wait! till heavenly light appears.

Crabbe thought it necessary to apologize for the "enthusiasm" of the

hymn, and to point out that Sir Eustace, had he been sane, would not

have been converted by "a methodistic call". "The World of Dreams," in

the same stanza, might take its place in "Sir Eustace Grey," so similar

are the processions of terrible fantastic visions. These things are

very strange among the vigorous but heavy-footed marches of Crabbe's

habitual style.

To return to "The Borough," Crabbe paints its very aspect with his

Dutch precision; and, incidentally, strikes at his rivals, the

enthusiasts of various sects, who were much more popular preachers than

himself.

Their, earth is crazy and their heaven is base,

he says of the followers of Swedenborg. As for the Jews,

They will not study and they dare not fight,

he exclaims; making an exception for Mendoza and other famed Semitic

bruisers. The poem is of some value to the social historian, and the

tales of the country coquette, and the horrible and haunted Peter

Grimes, have a gloomy vigour, and somewhat resemble, in poetry, the

moral pictures of Hogarth.

Crabbe's later works were collections of tales in verse, and with all

their merits their versification condemns them to general neglect. His

"Lady Barbara, or the Ghost" is not so successful in rendering the

well-known story of "The Beresford Ghost" as is Scott's early ballad

"The Eve of St John". To read with attention novels of everyday life

narrated in the metre of Pope, without the skill of Pope, requires a

vigorous effort.

In his Tales (as when a sturdy orthodox farmer expels the demon of

scepticism from his son by a sound trouncing) Crabbe is often somewhat

remote from our sympathetic modern tolerance of honest doubt. His

method of narration is obsolete. In "The Patron," the patronized youth

of humble birth, who has loved the Squire's daughter, is neglected,

And in the bed of death the youth reposed.

The nymph of his adoration is thus corrected by her mother:--

"Emma," the lady cried, "my words attend,

Your syren-smiles have killed your humble friend;

The hopes you raised can now delude no more,

Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore."

People did not speak in that style in Miss Austen's day; or in any

other day.

Crabbe died in the same year as Sir Walter Scott, who, like Byron,

Wordsworth, and Tennyson, appreciated that in him which was rare,

excellent, and original.

[1] The Bannatyne Club, for the printing and preservation of old

manuscripts, a kind of Scottish Roxburghe Club, was founded by Sir

Walter Scott in memory of the old lover of poetry.

CHAPTER XXX.

GEORGIAN PROSE.

I.

_The Great Novelists._

The novel, since the days of the mediaeval romances, and the

Elizabethan prose stories from Sidney's "Arcadia" to the tales of

Greene and Nash, was never quite unrepresented in England, for example,

there were translations and imitations of the huge French "Heroic"

romances; Bunyan's stories are religious and moral novels, and under

the Restoration Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) wrote short novels of

love which do not quite deserve the bad reputation conferred on them

by an anecdote told by Sir Walter Scott. Eliza Haywood (1693-1756)

was prolific in prose tales, and is the author of a little romance of

Prince Charles's adventures in 1749-1750, disguised as "A Letter of

H-- G--," Henry Goring, the Prince's equerry. But in literary circles,

the novel was held in as high disdain as it was later, before Scott

produced "Waverley" (1814).

The novel of modern life, manners, and sentiment first came to its

own as the universal joy of reading mankind in Richardson's "Pamela";

advertised as it was, in modern fashion from the pulpits of all

denominations.

Samuel Richardson, the son of a Yorkshire joiner, was born in 1689,

and after being educated at the Charterhouse was apprenticed to a

London printer. As a boy he made small sums by writing love-letters

for maid-servants and others who were unable to write for themselves;

and when, as a middle-aged man, he turned to writing novels, he cast

them in the form of letters. "Pamela," which he began to publish in

1740, is the story of a girl who is a waiting-maid to a lady and is

persecuted by her mistress's son; in the end he marries her and becomes

a model husband. It may annoy us from the very strange and unnatural

way in which all the characters behave. Pamela strikes us less as a

being of equal innocence and virtue, mistress of her own passion for

"the dear obliger," Mr. B. (only the initial is given), than as a

young woman who knows her game and plays her cards most adroitly. Her

snobbishness was, no doubt, in the manner of her class in her day, but

we approve of Pamela no more than Fielding did, when he overwhelmed it

with the sturdy laughter of his parody, "Joseph Andrews," brother of

Pamela, and as virtuous as that paragon, yet no milksop. But "Pamela"

was admired beyond "this side idolatry".

"Clarissa" (1748) is another novel of Virtue in danger and distress,

but Clarissa is a lady of good family and fortune, and of a pure and

heroic spirit. Decoyed from her home and friends by the wiles of the

professional seducer, Lovelace, a rake so brilliant and witty and

reckless as to win the hearts, if not of Clarissa, of all Richardson's

lady readers, Clarissa is exposed to the last extreme of misery,

steadily refuses to marry the scoundrel who has wronged her, and dies

slowly among the sobs of the congregation.

"Sir Charles Grandison," whose name has become a proverb in the English

language, appeared in 1753, and is one of the longest books that ever

was printed. It is very badly constructed too, and contains lengthy

episodes which have nothing to do with the story, and only puzzle and

confuse the reader. Properly speaking it is not so much a novel as a

series of incidents, all tending to the glorification of the hero, who

is made up of long words, fine sentiments and whalebone. The women of

the tale are less exasperating than the men, though they can hardly

be considered attractive. The reason of this may be found in the fact

that Richardson neither sought nor was sought by men, while he was

in the habit of reading his manuscripts to a group of enthusiastic

young ladies (among whom was the future Mrs. Chapone) in his garden at

Fulham. Unluckily his audience, who might have been of service to him

in pointing out that well-bred people had other manners than those of

the characters of Richardson, were too deeply engulfed in admiration to

be capable of criticism; or possibly they may not have been aware, as

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was, that Richardson did not know the society

which he described. The letters themselves, besides showing a frankness

and lack of reticence which it may confidently be said few real letters

could ever parallel, are of a length which even on a desert island no

one could write. The genuine letters in his correspondence, between him

and the unknown but worshipping Lady Bradshaigh, and their romantic

and elaborate arrangements to discover each other in Hyde Park, are

far more amusing reading. Richardson has been accused, and justly, of

a portentous lack of humour, but if his reader has any of his own, he

will not read the novels in vain.

These censures are the candid criticism of the modern reader who finds

that he cannot think himself back into the circle of Richardson, who

finds its Virtue and its Sentiment hardly intelligible, though he

is entirely at home with the society of all degrees that Fielding

describes, or that lives in Boswell's "Life of Johnson," and in the

"Letters" of Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, expressing

themselves like people of this world. But though Richardson lived

in a kind of moral and sentimental hothouse, where one can scarcely

breathe; though he had a more than feminine liking for accumulated

minutenesses of details and a more than mediaeval prolixity; yet his

full-length pictures of his personages, stippled like a miniature in

a ring, delighted not only English but continental, especially French

readers. It was an age when people took little exercise, were little in

the open air, and passed endless hours in conversation on the ethics

and philosophy of love and sentiment. The Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay

are partly a romance in the manner of Richardson, and to read them is

to understand the society which found in him its ideal novelist. "The

man would hang himself who tried to read 'Clarissa' for its story,"

said Dr. Johnson, a friend of the author, partly because the author

was the friend of Virtue. We, if we please, may detest and disbelieve

in Lovelace, who was, none the less, the conqueror of the hearts of

the ladies of the time, that implored Richardson to convert a hero so

brilliant, witty and amiable. But for Richardson it had been enough to

convert Mr. B., and he was artist enough to refuse to gratify tastes

which, in the manner of Charles II., demanded that all tragedies should

end happily. Scott, with the resurrection of Athelstane; Dickens, with

the conversion of Estella, were more good-naturedly and erroneously

amenable to the requests of friends.

There was a blush between Charles Lamb and the girl who sat down beside

him to read "Pamela," and, in fact, Richardson's way of educating girls

in virtue may seem apt to have effects which he did not contemplate.

Other times, other manners.

Henry Fielding.

To say anything at once new and true about Henry Fielding passes the

power of man. His defects and his qualities; the good in him and in his

work, and the not so good, are so conspicuous that his contemporaries,

and later generations down to our own, have passed on them the same

remarks. There are the admirers of Fielding, who justly see in him

one of the three very greatest of English novelists of contemporary

life and manners as exhibited in the portions of society which he knew

and illustrated. But he did not take all contemporary society for his

province. Born at Sharpham Park, in Somerset, in 1707, he had far

greater advantages of birth than other men of the pen. The House of

Fielding is ancient and noble, though, unlike Gibbon in his monumental

compliment to Fielding, Mr. Horace Round cannot accept its connexion

with the House of Hapsburg.

The Fieldings had two Earldoms, of Desmond (in Ireland) and of Denbigh;

Fielding's father was of a cadet branch of the family: Lady Mary

Wortley Montagu was a kind of cousin of the novelist. He was educated

at Eton and in the law-loving University of Leyden; but when he "came

upon the town," in 1728, he did not associate himself with the circle

of Pope and Bolingbroke and the wits and the great ladies; he does not

draw his characters from that splendid society, though Lady Bellaston,

in "Tom Jones," is a member thereof.

Fielding had to live by his brains, by writing comedies, and by

journalism. He showed his genius for parody of the heroic tiresome

tragedy that was "such an unconscionable time adying," in "Tom Thumb

the Great"; and his dangerous turn for political satire in "The

Historical Register" (1737). But the Licensing Act, making the Lord

Chamberlain, or his subaltern, Licencer of Plays, excluded Fielding

from that course; he was called to the Bar (1740), where he did not

practise much. He was married in 1735 to the original, it is said, of

the exquisite Sophia of "Tom Jones"; he wrote in the Press; in 1745 he

took the Hanoverian side, in "The True Patriot," and "The Jacobite's

Journal," in mockery so named; and during all this period he saw a

great deal of the world, especially the world of the stage and of light

literature.

But of all this he makes little display in his novels. He falls back

on the humours of the country: on the country parson, Adams; the Tory

Squire, Squire Western; a neighbour, in character of Sir Tunbelly

Clumsey, and so good an Englishman that he rejoices when he hears

that "twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Kent" to back

the Rightful King, and the landed interest, against Hanoverians,

financiers, and Whigs in general. His excellent Allworthy is no

townsman; Mr. Thomas Jones, a Foundling, is country born and country

bred; most of the adventures of Joseph Andrews take place in the

country; in "Amelia" we are in town, and in taverns and prisons often,

but by no means "in society".

"Jonathan Wild" is a tale of town villains and rogues; and Fielding's

minor characters, from postilions to philosophers, like Philosopher

Square, landlords, landladies, serving-men, lawyers, parsons,

unfortunate ladies, people on the road, are of ordinary humanity, with

a considerable sprinkling of hypocrites. He had heard the chimes at

midnight and much later; he had hunted; he had lived the tavern life,

the life of debts and expedients, but he "had kept the bird in his

bosom," the sterling excellence of his heart; pity for the poor and

oppressed; honour, good humour, tolerance, and manly indignation.

To Fielding, Richardson's "Pamela," the text of many a sermon, the

snow-pure prudent Pamela, with Virtue rewarded by the hand of the

enterprising Mr. B., was even as a red rag to a bull. He did not weep

over Pamela's tears, these "pearly fugitives". He no more believed

in Mr. B.'s return to virtue than in that of Vanbrugh's Loveless.

Respectability was so far from being his favourite virtue, that, like

many very inferior writers, he inclined to identify it, unjustly, with

hypocrisy.

Consequently he began "Joseph Andrews" as a parody or burlesque of

"Pamela". That paragon had a brother, appropriately named Joseph;

and the virtue of Joseph is assailed like that of his sister, but in

vain. Joseph is invincibly respectable, yet no hypocrite, but a very

manly young fellow with an honest love in his own rank. The story soon

ceased to be a parody; that grotesque, learned, excellent and extremely

muscular Christian, Parson Adams, came into the tale with the egregious

Mrs. Slipslop; and the thing became a "picaresque" novel, a tale of the

road and of chance meetings: with the lesson that kind hearts are more

than coronets, and a postilion, later guilty of robbing a hen roost,

is a better Christian than a whole coach-load of Pharisees. Indeed

St. Augustine, once at least, robbed an orchard, yet became a shining

light, having been misled (as regards the apples and pears) by his

sense of humour.

"Joseph Andrews," though its language is occasionally coarse, as

regards its meaning is not obscure, and it is certainly one of the

most amusing works in our language: though it is not written for small

boys and little girls. We meet Pamela and Mr. B. (cruelly styled Mr.

Booby), again at the close, and they behave ill in church, when Joseph

is married.

Richardson was very much hurt, of course, and spoke very ill of

Fielding; if he forgave Fielding, he "forgave him as a Christian,"

like Rowena in Ivanhoe, "'which means,' said Wamba, 'that she does not

forgive him at all'".

There is an endless discussion about Fielding's morality. Natural

goodness of heart is everything with him. Of his Tom Jones the epitaph

might be that devised by Joe Gargery in "Great Expectations" for his

reprobate of a father,

Whatsume'er the failings on his part,

Remember reader he were that good in his hart.

Thomas was "that good at his heart" and lectures young Nightingale

very nobly on the infamy of corrupting virtue. But where there is

no virtue to corrupt in others, Thomas pays no attention to his

own. Perhaps he could have resisted temptation, in Nightingale's

circumstances, but he is wisely kept out of it by the author. He does

what is thought the very basest thing that a man can do; Colonel

Newcome never forgave him; if we are to pardon Tom it must be, as Dumas

urges in the case of Porthos, because, "other times, other manners".

This affair is the dangerous step in "Tom Jones" (1749), that epic of

the eighteenth century. Fielding thought of it as an epic in prose; he

is fond of burlesquing Homer and of quoting Aristotle. The plot has

been praised by Coleridge and justly, as on a level with that of the

"Œdipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles. The construction of plots has not been

the strong point of most great novelists, but Fielding set this good

example, not immaculate of course, but admirable.

The real merit of the book lies in its pell-mell of characters, all

delineated with exquisite humour, wit, and observation, from the

mysterious mother of the hero, and the adorable Sophia, to the adroit

hypocrite, Blifil; the uproarious stupid fox-hunter, the Jacobite who

drinks healths, Squire Western; the philanthropic yet really good

Allworthy; the delightful pedantic Partridge, with his tags of Latin

quotations; the rural ruffian, Black George; the harmless vanity of

Miss Western (the aunt), the sternly Protestant and Anglican, but not

immaculately virtuous Philosopher Square, and all the attendant crowd.

The moral introductory reflections may, of course, be skipped, yet not

by wise readers, for they are full of Fielding's humour, and display

his confidence in the immortality of his book.

Fielding was Thackeray's master and model; in his too frequent

reflections he follows Fielding too closely. If all men were equally

fortunate, they would all read "Tom Jones" in the six small volumes of

the First Edition: but in any edition the book is delightful. Charlotte

Brontë thought it corrupting to such young fellows as her brother, the

unhappy Branwell, but Branwells will go their own way, with or without

the aid of the too fortunate Foundling.

Fielding was a sturdy Hanoverian, but he was mortal and an author. He

must have been pleased had he known that the hero of 1745 (the year in

which the tale is cast), that Prince Charles then lurking in a Parisian

convent, purchased "Tom Jones," both in French and English.

Earlier than "Tom Jones" is "Jonathan Wild the Great," the romance

of a thief-taker and sharer of spoils with thieves, who was gibbeted

in 1725. It is customary to speak of this book, a satire of the

"greatness" of men like Julius Cæsar, as a masterpiece of irony, and as

a success in the field where Thackeray, on the same estimate, failed

with "Barry Lyndon". If irony is to be openly and noisily unveiled in

every page, then "Jonathan Wild" may be a masterpiece of irony. The

reader may be left, if he can read "Jonathan Wild," to compare it with

"Barry Lyndon" for himself, and to draw his own conclusions as to the

relative merits of these books. The deliciously absurd adventures of

Mrs. Heartfree, like those of the heroines of late Greek romances, are,

at all events, intentionally or unintentionally funny. Sir Walter Scott

disliked this masterpiece, and after reading it, and the commendations

which eminent modern critics bestow upon it, the writer cannot honestly

dissent from the disrelish of Sir Walter. He is said not to have

understood Fielding's meaning which Fielding constantly proclaims and

avows, namely that greatness of intellect and ambition without goodness

of heart is a mischievous monstrosity. Mr. Carlyle, in some moods of

hero-worship, might have differed, but we can give a general assent

without wading through "Jonathan Wild".

Fielding's own heart was as good as Steele's. He adored his beautiful

wife as Steele adored Prue. But, while "the greatest blessing is a

faithful and beloved wife," says our author in "Amelia," "it rather

tends to aggravate the misfortune of distressed circumstances from

the consideration of the share which she is to bear in them". But the

circumstances were distressed because Fielding, like Amelia's Captain

Booth, was "a good fellow," and, like Johnson's friend, Savage, was

at no time of his life the first to leave any company,--over the

punch bowl. And Amelia was listening for every footstep, and dreading

every accident of the streets, and money was a minus quantity, and a

scrag of mutton was a rare festival, because Captain Booth had every

generosity except that of a little self-denial.

By 1749 Mr. Fielding, as his friendly biographer says, "was a martyr

to gout". "He had not stolen it," and we have heard of another

sufferer, "a martyr to delirium tremens". By this time his wife was

dead; later he married her maid, an excellent woman, Mary Daniel,

probably of an old and ruined Jacobite family of Daniel. At the end of

1748 Fielding had been made a stipendiary magistrate for Westminster.

Unlike his Jonathan Thrasher, Esq., J.P., who was infamously corrupt,

and as ignorant of the law as the country justice before whom Frank

Osbaldistone appears in "Rob Roy," Fielding brought to his work his

honesty, courage, and sympathy with the poor.

The first chapters of his "Amelia" (1751) contain pictures of the

contemporary corruption of justice, and the laxity of the prisons.

Thence came the misfortunes of Captain Booth, a true lover, but also a

young man in the prime of life. From this error of the Captain's, who

met a Circe in prison, and from the greatness of his wife's character,

the beautiful Amelia, the plot of the novel adroitly develops itself.

She was "too good to be true". On the other hand the high spirit and

temper of Miss Matthews make her a kind of shady Brynhild; and only

coincidences in which Captain Booth recognized the hand of Providence

prevent the most tragical catastrophe. "Men worship women on their

knees; when they get up they go away," says Fielding's great successor.

They never get up and go away when they worship Amelia.

The book, in addition to her and Miss Matthews, presents the

delightfully amusing characters of Colonel Bath, "old honour and

dignity," who fights Booth in Hyde Park from motives of the purest

friendship; Colonel James, with a philosophy of love rather like Lord

Foppington's; Sergeant Atkinson, a kind of later Great Heart; Mrs.

Ellison, a lady "not of the nicest delicacy"; Murphy, a Jonathan Wild

as attorney; and a score of other characters worthy of their creator.

With "Joseph Andrews" and "Tom Jones," "Amelia" is an immortal glory of

English fiction.

Fielding's experiences led him into plans for suppressing lawlessness,

and for important social reforms. In 1753 he took the side of

Elizabeth Canning in that unsolved mystery of a girl who, if not a good

girl, "has been too hard for me," says Fielding. His own behaviour,

in the case of Miss Virtue's examination, is rather startling to the

modern student; and whether he ended as a partisan of the Gipsy or

of Elizabeth Canning is uncertain (1753-1754). Elizabeth made a good

marriage, in America, whither she was banished, and lived and died

respected.

In his pamphlet on Elizabeth's affair, which excited and divided

London for more than a year, Fielding speaks of his illness and

overtaxed strength. He spent what was left of it in his public duties;

was advised to voyage to Portugal, and his "Journal of a Voyage to

Lisbon," written with a dying hand, is the record of his sufferings and

reflections. He sailed in the "Queen of Portugal" (Captain Veal), had

intervals of enjoyment, and sketched, with his usual humour, the events

and incidents of the expedition. He died at Lisbon on 8 October, 1754.

Tobias Smollett.

The name of Smollett is coupled as familiarly with that of Fielding

as the name of Thackeray with that of Dickens. Smollett and

Fielding were contemporaries: both came of ancient families: each

had a profession;--Smollett was a physician while Fielding was a

barrister,--but each lived mainly by journalism, literature and

fiction. If opinions as to their relative merits were divided in

their day, posterity has awarded the crown to Fielding. The reason is

obvious: Fielding is full of good humour; in him there is no rancour;

he admires good women almost to adoration, and paints them as only the

very greatest poets have done. Again, his tales are well constructed,

especially "Tom Jones". On the other hand Smollett allows his story

to wander in the roads and haunt the inns, and encounter grotesque

adventures; he has bitter grudges against all and sundry, especially

against his patrons and his kinsfolk. His heroines are regarded by his

heroes rather as luxuries than as ladies; his heroes, to be plain,

are not merely libertines, but often behave like selfish ruffians;

and his relish for odious images and thoughts is hardly surpassed by

that of Swift. These faults in temper and taste have made Smollett

unpopular, despite his wide knowledge of life; his irresistible power

of compelling laughter, his swaggering vein. But, if he drew Roderick

Random and Peregrine Pickle from himself, he gave them bad qualities

far in excess of his own, and did not endow them with many of his own

better attributes. Smollett would never have used the loyal Strap as

Roderick Random often does; and was incapable of what may be styled

the dastardly plot in which Peregrine was fain to have imitated

Richardson's Lovelace.

Smollett was born in 1721, a younger son of a younger son of the

ancient house of Smollett of Bonhill, on the Leven near Loch Lomond.

An ancestor of his, he says, blew up a galleon of the Spanish Armada

in Tobermory Bay. He did indeed, by an act of suborned treachery.

Like Burns, Tobias celebrated in verse his native stream; like Burns

in boyhood he devoured the truculent romance of "Wallace" by Blind

Harry. He was poor, and believed himself to be badly treated by his

kinsfolk; after studying at Glasgow University he was apprenticed to

a surgeon. In 1739 he went to London to push his fortunes, carrying

with him a foolish tragedy on the murder of James I, which was the

apple of his eye. No manager would accept it, wherefore Smollett

raged against Garrick and Lord Lyttelton: he puts the story of his

woes into "Roderick Random," where Mr. Melopoyn, unhappy poet, is the

sufferer. He got what Chatterton and Goldsmith failed to obtain, the

post of surgeon's mate in a ship of war; lived through the distresses

of the siege of Carthagena (1741), and obtained that knowledge of

naval squalor and brutality, and of the good qualities of sea-men,

which he used in "Roderick Random" and in the characters of Bowling

and Trunnion. Leaving the navy, he married in Jamaica, came to town,

practised as a physician, and certainly lived in most fashionable

quarters. He speaks of Bob Sawyer's method of advertisement by being

hastily called out of church as an old trick; perhaps Dickens, a reader

of Smollett from his childhood, borrowed here from "Count Fathom". His

patriotism was stirred by the fatal disaster of Culloden, and he boldly

published his "Tears of Scotland" (1746).

In 1748 he published "Roderick Random," the history of a meritorious

orphan who lives on his servant, cheats his tailor, is a gambler, and

enriches himself in the slave trade; but all is to be forgiven to

Roderick's ebullient vigour and occasional sentimentalism. There are

countless changes of scene and varieties of character, from the ocean

to the Marshalsea Prison, to adventures in French service, from Strap

and Bowling to the literary Miss Snapper and the unfortunate Miss

Williams. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu supposed her cousin, Fielding,

to be the author, which showed little discrimination, though her

ladyship's letters are among the wittiest and most brilliantly amusing

of her century. Smollett had a bitter feud with Fielding; we do not

know, or care, for what cause. The briskness of the book, and the

novelty of the nautical horrors, made Smollett's reputation.

Going to Paris in 1750, Smollett found some of the characters who

appear in the crowd of "Peregrine Pickle" (1751), of which the first

edition aroused censures on passages later pruned by the author. It

is a work of amazingly careless vigour and humour: the irrepressible

Peregrine is even a less desirable hero than Roderick; and an infamous

Jacobite spy was not ill-advised in choosing Pickle for his pseudonym.

Emilia is more than too good for the rascal to whom she descends in

marriage, after escaping plots of his which might have disgusted

Pamela's Mr. B. But Cadwallader Crabtree, Hatchway and Pipes, and

Commander Hawser Trunnion are immortal characters; it is cruel to call

Trunnion caricatured; he is a comic masterpiece.

The "Ferdinand, Count Fathom" (1753), the adventurous son of a suttler

and murderess, is not a much worse man than Peregrine, but, in place

of Trunnion and Pipes, we are entertained with a queer attempt at

romance in the loves of Rinaldo and Monimia, who meets her lover as

he weeps over her empty tomb. "Sir Lancelot Greaves," a modern Don

Quixote, armour and all, was preferred by Scott to "Jonathan Wild,"

and, despite the patent absurdity of the armed knight, is really a much

more agreeable story. In 1763 Smollett visited Italy, and his grumbling

hypochondriacal narrative of his tour was ridiculed by that more

sentimental traveller, Sterne. His "Adventures of an Atom" (1769) is a

scurrilous political satire. On the other hand his "Humphry Clinker"

(1771), a narrative, in letters, of a journey by English travellers

in Scotland, is both more good-humoured and more amusing than any of

his other stories--Matthew Bramble is a favourable study of his later

self; Lieutenant Lismahago is a kind of Dugald Dalgetty, born more than

a century later than the laird of Drumthwacket, and the spelling and

innocent good-hearted absurdity of Winifred Jenkins endear her to every

reader, as a contrast to Tabitha Bramble, a bad kind of old maid. Here

we meet Ferdinand, Count Fathom, as a sincerely converted character!

Smollett is not only remarkable for variety, humour, vigour, as a

social observer: he strongly influenced both Fanny Burney and Dickens.

His History of England has been justly described by Sir Pitt Crawley

as less interesting but less dangerous than that by Hume. Smollett,

revisiting Italy, died at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, in the early autumn

of 1771.

CHAPTER XXXI.

GEORGIAN PROSE.

II.

Samuel Johnson.

We could scarcely understand how Dr. Johnson gained his immense

influence and acknowledged chiefship in literature if we had only his

works of various kinds before us. But he had a friend and biographer,

James Boswell, Esq. (younger of Auchinleck in Ayrshire), and "Bozzy,"

by showing Johnson as he was and talked, explains his supremacy. In

an age when classical learning counted for something, Johnson was,

especially in Roman literature, vastly learned. In a time when people

who could tear themselves from cards, took little exercise, but sat and

talked, over wine or over tea, or as they slowly sauntered, Johnson

was probably the best and certainly the best reported of the talkers.

While politicians like Burke, and painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds,

and musicians like Burney (Fanny Burney's father), were men of letters,

critics, talkers, a scholar and author who could talk like Johnson

was certain of his reward, was sure to be at the front. Though he

confessed himself not specially partial to clean linen; though he did

not eat in a neat and cleanly fashion; though he had the strange tricks

which we know so well; though if his pistol missed fire in argument he

knocked you down with the butt; though he had curious prejudices, was

at heart a Jacobite, and could be extremely rude, yet the excellence

of his heart, his large sagacity, his immense knowledge and readiness,

his humour, all of him that is immortally delightful to read about

in Boswell's Life, won his forgiveness and his welcome from the most

refined of men and women. He thought himself a lady's man, he said,

and a man of the world, and he was thoroughly a man's man, with heart,

and tongue, and hands, if that were necessary.

As a playwriter, he had not great success, and his friend Goldsmith's

comedies keep the stage, unlike Johnson's tragedy. Johnson's tale

"Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," has wisdom and humour enough, "wit

enough to keep it sweet," but it never did nor ever can share the

popularity of Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield".

Johnson's essays, in "The Rambler" and "The Idler," may still be but

are seldom read: they are far less alive than the essays of Addison

and Steele, and are weighed down by the ponderous harmonies of the

Latinised style.

Of his books, "The Lives of the Poets," written in his old age, are,

to some, we may hope to many, readers, entrancing. Here we find the

Johnson of conversation. He is not, indeed, a scientific biographer, a

searcher among old letters and old records. But his memory was rich in

anecdotes of the half century before his own; his style contains many a

humorous comment, and his criticism is often acute, and always honest,

and unaffectedly tinged, especially when he writes of the republican

and puritan Milton, or of the dainty, yet, in poetry, revolutionary

Gray, with all the literary and political prejudices that gave salt to

his conversation. There may have been more enlightened critics, but

none was ever more entertaining.

If his literary biographies are not of the most exact, they are

occasionally minute enough. "Pope's weakness was so great, that he

constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a waterman (of

Twickenham) who, in lifting him into his boat, had often felt them."

Again, "Pope once slumbered at his own table while the Prince of Wales

was talking of poetry". In his "Life of Swift" Johnson is by no means

friendly, and publishes an anecdote which was indignantly denied. His

life of his friend, Richard Savage, a most detestable person, is an

example of Johnson's loyalty and tolerance. Supposing that Savage was

the son of the Countess of Macclesfield, and was persecuted by her with

incredible cruelty, yet his conduct in most ways was detestable, though

Johnson, who candidly narrates the facts, good-humouredly condones

them. The conversation of Savage must, apparently, have won the heart

of "the great Lexicographer". Even the Dictionary of the Doctor

contains several of his good sayings, and perhaps the learning and

persevering industry which Johnson displayed as a "drudge" increased

his reputation, and won for him friends and admirers, as much as his

more literary works.

The outlines of his life are too well known to need more than a brief

summary. His family was matter of interest to the Highlanders when

he visited them, was he a MacIan of Glencoe or a Johnston of the

Border? He was born at Lichfield (18 September, 1709), his father was

a bookseller. His Oxford career, at Pembroke College, was embittered

by poverty, but he retained a great affection for his college and

University, which delighted to honour him. He kept a school without

much profit, and, coming to London with Garrick in 1737, lived the life

of Grub Street, doing translations, writing for Cave's "Gentleman's

Magazine," compiling parliamentary debates in which he "took care

not to let the Whig dogs have the best of it". Of his doings in 1745

Boswell could learn nothing, and there was a fancy that he was inclined

to take part in what he called "a gallant enterprise," that of Prince

Charles.

His "London," an imitation of Juvenal, was well thought of by Pope,

and Scott took more pleasure in no modern poem than in Johnson's

manly, resolute, and mournful "Vanity of Human Wishes," also based on

Juvenal's satire (1749). The "Rambler" and "Idler," were his next works

(with the Dictionary), and in 1759 he rapidly wrote "Rasselas," to pay

the expenses of his mother's funeral. In 1762 he accepted, from a King

who "gloried in the name of Briton," a pension of £300 yearly. He lived

much, after this date, at the house of Mrs. Thrale and her husband, "my

Master" as she called him, the rich brewer. Here he was happy in the

society of many wits, of the beautiful Sophy Streatfield, "with nose

and notions à la Grecque," and of Fanny Burney, blessed in the success

of "Evelina". Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney have left many reminiscences

of him which complete the account by his young Scottish adorer and

butt, Boswell.

Johnson founded the Club, and such was his influence that the Club did

not blackball Bozzy. With him Johnson made his difficult journey to the

Western Islands of Scotland; so happily described both by Boswell and

himself; stayed at Dunvegan Castle, was entertained by Flora Macdonald,

met a learned minister in Skye who was a sceptic about Homer, inquired

into the Second Sight; stayed at Inveraray Castle with the Duke of

Argyll; and at St. Andrews was told that at Oxford they had nothing

like the St. Andrews University Library. On hearing this Dr. Johnson,

for once, made no reply.

His "Lives of the Poets" was written in 1779-1781, when he was 70 years

of age and more. His cruel last illness was nobly borne; he died on 13

December, 1784, one of the best, greatest, wisest, and most humorous of

Englishmen.

His "Lives," and the Life of him are among the works which time cannot

stale; read ten times over they please the more, and more excellencies

are discovered. No man of times past is known so well, and none was so

well worth knowing. His critical tastes and rules are not ours, and

perhaps even in his own day were falling out of fashion; but they are

none the less historically valuable.

Oliver Goldsmith.

Dr. Johnson carried all his set with him into renown, and though Oliver

Goldsmith was a writer of versatile and charming genius, but for his

friendship with Johnson he would have been much less successful in

life, and less well loved and remembered after his death.

Like several great writers born in Ireland, Goldsmith was of an

English family, but they had been so long settled in Ireland that they

had become "more Irish than the Irish". Goldsmith's father had the

care of Protestant souls at Pallasmore, County Longford, where (10

November, 1728) the poet was born. The father obtained a cure worth

more than the "forty pounds a year" at Lissoy in West Meath, and Lissoy

contributes some features to the Auburn of the "Deserted Village," an

ideal village, in an ideal state of desertion. His father, according to

Goldsmith's poetry and prose, was a most excellent man; more capable of

teaching his family how to spend large fortunes in benevolence than

how to earn a maintenance,

More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.

He was the generous host of "all the vagrant train," of "the

long-remembered beggar," an Irish Edie Ochiltree, of "the ruined

spendthrift," who "claimed kindred," and came to "scorn," and of "the

broken soldier".

Careless their merits or their faults to scan

His pity gave ere charity began.

This pity was Goldsmith's own characteristic. When an exceedingly poor

scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, his feats of charity matched those

of St. Francis or St. Martin of Tours. He is said to have given away

his blanket, and slept in the ticking of his bed.

A love of fine clothes was no less part of his nature than love of

his neighbours, while he liked "the cards," and the bowl and tavern

talk. He took his bachelor's degree in February, 1749: idled away

a year or two at home, learned to play the flute, failed to take

holy orders, and, as a medical student, went to Edinburgh University

(1752-1754) lived on the benevolence of an uncle, Contarine, and, on

his way to Leyden, was taken in the company of five or six Scottish

gentlemen in French service, who had been recruiting for King Louis in

the Highlands. Alan Breck may have been in this adventure. Throughout

1755-1756, Goldsmith roamed about the Continent, supporting himself by

his flute, and entertained by the hospitality of the Universities.

"Sir," said Johnson, "he disputed his way through Europe," as the

Admirable Crichton had done, a hundred and seventy years earlier. At

Padua, it is thought, if anywhere, he obtained his Doctor's degree:

his adventures later gave him materials for essays, for the wandering

scholar in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and for his poem, "The Traveller".

"He was making himself all the time."

Returning to England in 1756, he lived as an usher in a small school;

as a corrector for the press; as a kind of indentured reviewer and

general hack to Griffiths the publisher; failed to pass as a naval

surgeon; wrote with Smollett's literary gang, conducted a weekly

booklet or magazine, "The Bee," for a few numbers (1759); and published

"An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe". He

was much more successful (1760) with letters in "The Public Ledger," in

the assumed character of a Chinese visitor to London.

In the former work Goldsmith complains that young genius effervesces

at college and is unrewarded, while dull plodders fatten. "The link"

between "the great" and the literary "now seems entirely broken". "An

author" is a thing only to be laughed at. "His person, not his jest,

becomes the mirth of the company." Indeed Goldsmith's person was

quaint, his attire, when in funds, was that of the bird of paradise;

while his wit flowed from his pen, not from his tongue; his repartee

was not ready; eager he was but apparently absent-minded in company. As

for the publisher, "it is his interest to allow as little as possible

for writing, and of the author to write as much as possible". Writers

for the stage suffer from the competition of the dead. Like two or

three men of genius of our day, Goldsmith asks "who will deliver us

from Shakespeare?" from "these pieces of forced humour, far-fetched

conceit, and unnatural hyperbole _which have been ascribed to

Shakespeare._" Here is scepticism! Managers make new authors wait some

years before giving their plays a chance: a malady most incident to

managers; and Garrick believed that _he_ was attacked.

The not unnatural acrimony of a neglected man appears in some of

the Chinese Letters (published in book form as "The Citizen of the

World"), notably in the visit to Westminster Abbey. Goldsmith had a

spite against the patronage, given to the art of painting, and made his

Chinaman share it. The same critic looks on Sterne's "Tristram Shandy"

as a lewd compound of pertness, vanity, and obscene buffoonery.

The Chinaman also attacked the brutality of the criminal law (that of

his own country being so mild), and generally inveighed against the

state of society. The Letters are an unflattering picture of the times.

By 1761 Johnson had made the acquaintance of Goldsmith, and henceforth

Goldsmith had not to complain of neglect from wits and authors. In

1764 he published his moral and contemplative poem "The Traveller";

with his "Deserted Village" it is perhaps the last good thing of the

old school of poems in rhymed heroic couplets. The dedicatory preface

to the author's brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, tells us that, as

society becomes refined, painting and music "offer the feeble mind a

less laborious entertainment" than poetry, which they supplant, while

"what criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse,

and Pindaric Odes, anapests (_sic_) and iambics, alliterative care and

happy negligence! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it!"

Goldsmith, in social matters rather a Socialist, is, in poetry,

opposing the slowly dawning freedom, and upholding the school of Pope.

But there is, in both of his longer poems, a kind of softness in the

versification, and of sincerity in the sentiments and descriptions

of Nature, which we miss in Pope, while each piece, as the man said

of "Hamlet," "is made up of quotations," of lines which live in many

memories like household words. The pictures of the parish clergyman,

of the schoolmaster, of the harmless old rustic ale-house, in the

"Deserted Village," may be called imperishable; and Goldsmith cries

"back to the land" and denounces "landlordism," and forced migration to

North America,

Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey.

Goldsmith, in fact, never revisited "the decent church," "the hawthorn

bush," the harmless pot-house, and other scenes of his infancy: in

his poem he blends an ideal Irish with an ideal English village, and

ascribes the result to a tyrannical, landlord with admirable pathetic

success.

Of his other poems "The Haunch of Venison," imitated from Horace, and

the witty and kind raillery of "Retaliation," in which his pen supplies

the wit that often failed his tongue in the wit-combats of "the Club,"

are both in "anapests" and are the most important. The "Lament for

Madame Blaise" is a lively adaptation from the French, and the "Elegy

on the Death of a Mad Dog" is a most vivacious piece. As a ballad

"Edwin and Angelina," though popular, is too unballad-like.

The works on which Goldsmith's fame depends are not his essays,

histories, or view of "Animated Nature," genially unscientific, but his

"Vicar of Wakefield" (written earlier, but sold by Johnson for while

Goldsmith was in a sponging house in 1764), and his two plays "The Good

Natured Man," and "She Stoops to Conquer" (1768, 1773).

"The Vicar of Wakefield" drew the highest possible praise from

Goethe, and the most furious of attacks from the critical pen of Mark

Twain. Nobody says that it shines in construction, but its humour and

sweetness, the goodness, the simplicity, the true wisdom, and the

learned foibles of the Vicar, with the humours of his wife, daughters,

and wandering scholar son, an usher, a dweller in Grub Street, make

"The Vicar of Wakefield" a book to be read once a year. "Finding

that the best things had not been said on the wrong side, I resolved

to write a book that should be wholly new... the learned world said

nothing to my paradoxes, nothing at all, sir." In the son's narrative

Goldsmith has his usual flout at art and amateurs of art, and Pietro

Perugino.

The plays are too well known for comment, with Croaker and Lofty, the

Bailiffs, Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle, the revellers at the Three

Pigeons, and young Marlow, they are at least as familiar on the amateur

as on the professional boards. They brought to Goldsmith fame, some

money and more credit, but he was still a drudge, still working for

booksellers, and deep in debt, when his death on 4 April, 1774, made

Reynolds for once lay down his brush, saddened the Club, and filled

the stairs of his chambers in Brick Court with poor weeping women to

whom he had been kind,--their only friend. "Nullum fere scribendi genus

non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," wrote Johnson in his

epitaph, adding a new phrase to Latin proverbial philosophy.[1]

Edmund Burke.

"It seems probable," says Burke's biographer, Lord Morley, "that Burke

will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the

next twenty years" (from 1899) "than he has been within the whole of

the last eighty." Yet we do not find many references to Burke, who,

living, speaking, and writing through some thirty years of discontents

and revolutions (the American and the French) and bringing to problems

like our own a masculine judgment, and a lucid and energetic style,

might seem worthy of general study.

In a sketch of the history of literature space for the works of Burke,

saturated with politics as they are, and only to be understood in the

light of ample historical knowledge, cannot be provided. The speeches

of most successful orators are brilliant, and persuasive for the

hour, with crowds who wish to be persuaded. The speeches of Burke are

sometimes, when his pity and indignation are stirred (as by the fate

of Marie Antoinette, or the alleged infamies of Warren Hastings), rich

in floral components, in impassioned rhetoric. But, as a rule, his

best orations required to be read if they were to be appreciated; they

are too full of thought and knowledge and too logically built to be

generally effective at the moment.

Whatever our political opinions may be, we cannot but find Burke's

"Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies"

(22 March, 1775) a very great and noble literary work. For its purpose

it was futile; fierce peoples are not to be guided by all the eloquence

and all the wisdom of the wise. "We are called upon, as it were by a

superior warning Voice, again to attend to America; to attend to the

whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual degree

of care and calmness. Surely it is an awful subject; or there is none

so on this side of the grave."

It was an awful subject; but it was also a party question. Knowledge,

care, and calmness were, therefore, put out of action. On an infamous

proposal to "reduce the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the

southern colonies" by proclaiming the freedom of the black slaves and

raising a servile war, Burke said: "Slaves as these unfortunate black

people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a

little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation which has

sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose

causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more

in that inhuman traffic?"--the Slave Trade. The idea of sending, in

the same ship, samples of fresh "black ivory" and a proclamation of

freedom for all blacks, not unreasonably seemed absurd, to Burke.

This speech, so moving to the reader, is said to have driven members

out of the House; the gestures of the orator being clumsy, his tones

harsh, and his delivery hasty. Johnson said that his wit was "blunt";

Goldsmith, on the other hand, that he "cut blocks with a razor". He "to

party gave up what was meant for mankind," but, save through party,

mankind is not to be helped by the politicians.

To glance at the main facts of Burke's life, he appears to have been,

as far as his name shows, of Norman but long Hibernicised stock on his

father's side; of native Irish blood on that of his mother, a Miss

Nagle, a Catholic. He was born in Dublin, apparently on 12 January,

1729. His father was a solicitor. After two years at a small school

kept by a learned Quaker, Burke went to Trinity College, Dublin, where

he showed eager intellectual appetites, without paying much heed to the

academic round of studies. In 1750 he went to London, to the Middle

Temple, and studied law, but did not practise. In 1755 his father cut

off his allowance, in 1756 he married. He cannot have made money by

his "Vindication of Natural Society" (1756), written in the rhetorical

manner of Bolingbroke. The book is an ironical reply to Bolingbroke's

argument for "natural" against "revealed" religion. Transfer the view

to society: our religion may have its anomalies, yet our society has

far more and worse. Do you propose, therefore, to return to "natural

society"? "Natural" society was then supposed by the wise and learned

to be a happy go-as-you-please innocent communism. In fact, if savage

society be "natural" society it is emmeshed in the strangest and most

artificial, cruel, and filthy set of laws and customs: the marriage

laws, when carried (as they sometimes are) to their logical conclusion,

make marriage impossible! All this was not understood, but Burke, while

arguing against a sudden and violent break-up of society, did perceive

and state brilliantly, the glaring injustices of our society, as

Goldsmith did in "The Deserted Village".

Burke's "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the

Sublime and Beautiful" (1756) is a study in the science of "Æsthetics,"

a science which, if it has reached no very conspicuous results, is

now pursued with instruments and by a method not extant in Burke's

day. He only sought for "the _Origin_ of our ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful". He went into the psychology of pain and pleasure, and found

Beauty to be "some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the

human mind by the intervention of the senses". But what is the quality

and why does it automatically produce the effect? The qualities which

automatically excite in the mind the apperception of the beautiful are

comparatively small, smooth, varied without angularity, delicate, and

in colour clear and bright, but not strong or glaring. But a mountain,

or fire, is beautiful yet--does not present the six qualities.

Consequently we must not call a huge rough mountain beautiful but

sublime.

Burke does not pretend to know "the ultimate cause" of the emotions

produced in the mind, and he censures the daring of Sir Isaac Newton in

accounting for things by Ether. But Ether seems to prosper in modern

scientific thought.

We cannot follow Burke into metaphysics, but the ordinary reader may

test, by experience, his description of a lover in the presence of the

beloved. "As far as I could observe," says Burke, "the head reclines

something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and

the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the Object; the mouth is

a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a

low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly by the

side." Thus it seems probable "that beauty acts by relaxing the solids

of the whole system". On the other hand, the Sublime ought to string

up the solids, and we do hear of sublime objects which "petrify" the

percipient. Burke sought, at all events, for the answer to his problem

in the nature of man, in psychology.

The nature of Burke's financial resources, beyond what he made

by writing in the new "Annual Register" (1759,--a hundred a year

from Dodsley the publisher) is as mysterious as the address of his

fellow-countryman, The Mulligan, in Thackeray's book. In 1759 the

so-called "Single Speech Hamilton" employed him; in 1761 he went to

Ireland with Hamilton, who was secretary to Lord Halifax. Hamilton

treated him badly, and in 1765 he became secretary to the Marquis

of Rockingham, entered Parliament as member for Wendover, a pocket

borough, made his mark at once; wrote "Observations on the Present

State of the Nation" (1769), and the admirable "Thoughts on the Present

Discontents," a book always in season. How Burke, in 1768, contrived

to buy Beaconsfield in Bucks (£22,000) and to live at a rate of £2500

a year, the rental being £500, is a mystery deeper than that of "The

Man in the Iron Mask". Apparently there was a suffering Marquis in the

background: at least Burke owed large sums to Lord Rockingham, who

forgave the debt. No discreditable source of Burke's fairy gold can be

conjectured or conceived, as Goldsmith said he was

Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit,

"too nice" meaning "too scrupulous".

Burke did not hold office, save for one year (1782-1783). Though a Whig

and a "Pro-American," Burke never liked, never approved of the French

Revolution. Early in 1790, he spoke in Parliament, breaking away from

those enthusiasts for Liberty in her wildest mood, Fox and Sheridan.

His "Reflections on the French Revolution" (1790) had a large sale

and wide influence. People will judge Burke's influence, conduct

and eloquence, at this time, in accordance with their politics and

prejudices; his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," and other work of his

last years cannot be discussed without partisanship. He died on 9 July,

1797. "The age of chivalry is gone," is one of Burke's best-remembered

phrases. When was there an age of chivalry? If no swords leaped from

their sheaths for Marie Antoinette, in 1793, not one was drawn for

Jeanne d'Arc in 1431, not one for Mary Stuart in 1587.

The Revival of the Ballad.

Throughout the eighteenth century, despite the dominance of Pope

and his followers, and the poetry of the Town; despite the sturdy

resistance of Johnson; despite Goldsmith's complaints against Odes

and "anapests" and "blank verse" and "happy negligence," there were

streams of tendency making for literary freedom. Addison had lovingly

praised both the blank verse of Milton, and the purely popular art of

the ancient ballads. Men were beginning to look back with personal

interest at antiquity; not only at Spenser, Chaucer, and Shakespeare,

but at all the art and poetry of times past. As early as 1706-1711

Watson's "Choice Collection" of old Scottish poems was published:

and Allan Ramsay gave old things mixed with new in his "Evergreen,"

and "Tea Table Miscellany" between 1724 and 1727; others appeared in

d'Urfey's "Pills to Purge Melancholy" (1719), others in "Old Ballads"

(1723).

We have seen the antiquarianism of Gray, in his translations from the

Norse, and his interest in Macpherson's so-called "Ossian" (1760-1763).

Though there was no written Highland epic in existence, there were,

and are, "Ossianic ballads" in Gaelic, late popular survivals of

Irish poetry. Working in his own way on these, and on prose legends,

apparently, Macpherson led men's fancies back to the racing "sounds"

of the north; back to the Highland beliefs that had already fascinated

Collins; and emancipated poetry from the chatter of the coffee-house

and the tavern. The charlatanism of Macpherson disgusted Johnson; any

one could write Ossianisms, he said, who abandoned his mind to it, but

Macpherson, at least, pleased thousands, including so enthusiastic

a student of Homer as Napoleon Bonaparte, and stimulated Gaelic

researches.

In 1765 the publication of an old and famous manuscript folio by

Bishop Percy ("The Reliques") not only gave a new and popular source

of pleasure in ballads and old relics, but caused a noisy controversy,

which, again, led to close research. Percy "restored," altered, added

to, and omitted from his materials as taste and fancy prompted;

arousing the wrath of the crabbed antiquary, Joseph Ritson, who denied

that the manuscript folio existed. Had Percy published it as it stood

(which Furnivall and Hales at last succeeded in doing) the book would

have been unread except by a few antiquaries. Arranged by Percy, the

ballads became truly popular. They were followed, from 1774, by Thomas

Warton's "History of English Poetry," the work of an Oxford Professor

of Poetry (1757-1767) who, in a lazy University, was a serious student.

Nothing is more ruinous to literature than ignorance, excitedly

absorbed in the momentary present. In the manner briefly described,

men's minds became awake to the merits of the English literature of

many remote ages, and even to the interest of chivalry and chivalrous

romance, to the beauty of all art that had been discredited as "Gothic"

and "barbarous".

Horace Walpole.

A man who, if in an amateur and dandified way, assisted the advance

in literature, was the son of the famous and far from literary Whig

Minister of George I. and George II., Sir Robert Walpole. Born at the

end of September, 1717, Horace Walpole went to Eton in 1727, where he

won the friendship of Gray and prided himself on avoiding cricket and

fights with bargees. For Conway (Marshal Conway) and George Selwyn,

famous later as an eccentric wit, he had a life-long affection. From

Eton, Walpole went to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied

French, Italian, and painting, being congenitally incapable of the

mathematics, like Tennyson and Macaulay. His letters were already witty

and amusing. He began his tour with Gray in 1739, and, at Rome, was

"far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc. ... I would buy the

Coliseum if I could". Though he wrote fleeringly of his own tastes, he

was, in fact, far in advance of his age in appreciation of the best old

art, whether of classical Greece and Rome or of the early Italians.

To collect, to study society, to write his famous correspondence

with Horace Mann and many others--an informal social, political, and

literary history of his time,--was the business of Walpole's long

life. He gave himself dandified airs; he knew that he was not in the

strict sense a scholar, but he had an eagerly inquiring mind, and we

owe more to him than to Mr. Pepys. He practically began neo-Gothic

architecture--with all its faults he meant well,--by the building

of his Villa, Strawberry Hill, and "in a concatenation accordingly"

wrote the earliest pseudo-historic novel of supernatural terror,

"The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Like stories of R. L. Stevenson, and

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the tale is based on a dream. The author

found himself in a Gothic castle, and "on the uppermost bannister of a

great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour". The rest, with its

odd horrors and comic interludes of the servants, Walpole wrote without

plan: making his characters natural, not "heroic," his events as much

"supernatural" as he could.

From this fantasy came the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe (whose habit of

explaining the supernatural away Walpole derided), and, from Mrs.

Radcliffe, in part, came the impulse of Scott, and the moody heroes of

Byron. From the mustard seed of "Otranto" grew "a tree with birds in

all its boughs".

Walpole's play "The Mysterious Mother," was even morbidly romantic

in conception (1768). His "Historic Doubts" on Richard III. show a

new spirit of historic scepticism, and a desire to trace accepted

historical ideas to their ultimate sources of evidence. Such minute

inquiry was not common, when Hume and Smollett were our historians.

Walpole, who had succeeded to the Earldom of Orford, died on 2 March,

1797.

His "Anecdotes of Painting" and "Royal and Noble Authors" are all they

aimed at being; his Letters, in extent, observation, inner knowledge

of society, and wit, have no rivals in English, but his real position

in literature and taste is that of a pioneer. The true, the essential

Horace was very unlike Macaulay's splenetic portrait of him, and did

not deserve Thackeray's nickname "Horace Waddlepoodle".

Under his many affectations he was a true friend and a good patriot, a

delightful wit and an agency in the advance of literature and taste.

Between him and Dr. Johnson, of course, there was a gulf that neither

man dreamed of trying to cross.

Laurence Sterne.

Laurence Sterne can scarcely be ranged in any species of writers. He

was not a novelist, though his most humorous and exquisitely finished

characters, Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Obadiah, Dr. Slop,

Yorick, and Mrs. Shandy appear in what professed to be a kind of

novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," Gent (1760-1767).

These characters are really studies like those of Addison, but they

appeared in a long succession of volumes which obtained their great

vogue first of all, perhaps, by wild eccentricity--with blank pages,

asterisks, erasions, and even pages of marbled paper; next, now by

an undercurrent, now by an overflow, of indecent or indecorous story

or suggestion; thirdly, by the fact that these were the recreations

of a country parson. These allurements, were the first and transient

causes of Sterne's popularity, these and a quantity of odd anecdotes,

often borrowed wholesale from Burton's then forgotten "Anatomy of

Melancholy," as the lewd anecdotes were taken from French collections

of the sixteenth century. But while these baits, this "merriment of a

parson," allured the town, every reader of taste had the noblest excuse

for reading the book. It contained the grave and logical humours and

exquisite intellectual caprices of Shandy the father; the patient,

kind, dull tolerance of Mrs. Shandy (whose unexpected associations of

ideas resemble those of Mrs. Nickleby), the gallantry, simplicity, and

noble goodness of Uncle Toby (a person not wholly unlike a Colonel

Newcome of the eighteenth century), the similar qualities of his more

chivalrous Sancho, Corporal Trim; the wiles of the Widow Wadman; and,

what is pleasing to reflective minds, the Curse of Ernulphus, bestowed

"on him, Obadiah". "Our men swore terribly in Flanders," said Uncle

Toby, but the ancient formulæ of Catholic curses went far beyond our

men. For the sentimental there was the death of Lefevre, which, in

school reading books, but ineffectually appealed for tears to men now

old.

Thus much of "Tristram Shandy" is as good as good can be, and might be

collected, with explanatory passages, and exhibited without harm or

offence to any reader. But, so presented, it would lose the attraction

on which Sterne deliberately counted; the intermixture of insinuation

and buffoonery with character and sentiment. Great parts of "Tristram

Shandy," once, it seems, essential to its success, are now detrimental

to its general diffusion: all the more because the high and low

tumbling is that of a clergyman.

The author (born 1713) was English by family and descent, grandson of

a Cavalier English clergyman of the Great Rebellion, and Archbishop

of the Restoration. We meet his father, Roger Sterne, an ensign in a

regiment of foot, in Thackeray's "Esmond," where, in his wild way,

he makes a very sensible remark, when the exiled King, fighting for

France, rides up to the English lines. For several years, Laurence

Sterne followed the drums of his father's regiment, till, at 10 years

old, a kinsman sent him to school at Halifax (1723), and the life of a

camp where men swore terribly inspires his pictures of soldiers, but

was not the most chaste school for a little boy.

In 1733, rather old, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and made the

friendship of John Hall (Stevenson) of Skelton Castle. A humorist, a

reckless liver, he had a great and unholy influence on Sterne, who

took orders and two small livings in Yorkshire, and (1741) married a

lady of some property, after a sentimental wooing. Sentiment did not

last; Sterne, an accomplished philanderer, became "passing weary of her

love," and the pair were only kept together by Sterne's affection for

his daughter, Lydia.

Not till 1760 did the first volume of "Tristram Shandy" appear: born of

a casual spite against Dr. Slop (Dr. Burton, a Jacobite physician of

York), "Tristram" instantly made Sterne a "lion" in London, a friend

of the great, and a diner-out. In winter he wrote more "Shandy," and

published sermons on the strength of his success; in the summer he

worked at home, till a consumptive tendency sent him to the least

desirable parts of Southern France (by way of Paris where he met

everybody), and, later, to Italy. He died in London, alone (1768) save

for the lodging-house keeper, and a footman, a Macdonald of the Keppoch

branch, whose father followed Prince Charlie, and whose own childish

adventures, in 1745, as he has described them, were a subject made for

the hand of the expiring humorist.

He had kept on publishing, with varying success, new volumes of

"Tristram Shandy" almost to the end, when he had the happy thought

of beginning his "Sentimental Journey," with its bewildering mixture

of the old favourite matter with pretty vignettes of southern scenes

and manners, pictures with the prettiness and other qualities of the

French painter, Greuze. Here we have both the admired hungry donkey,

fed by Sterne with macaroons, and the sentimentalized dead donkey,

which provoked the scepticism of Mr. Samuel Weller. Sterne sketched

the French as Hogarth did, but with infinitely more sensibility

and sympathy, he is a classic in France, no less than in England.

Sterne's letters and "Journal to Eliza," a very characteristic piece,

are collected in Mr. Lewis Melville's "Life and Letters of Sterne".

His biographer (Mr. H. D. Traill, 1882) says that Sterne "undergoes,

I suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share of

reverential neglect". If this be so, Sterne himself, with his acrobatic

clowning, is to blame, but the loss lies on the readers of mature

age who neglect this contemplator of human life, this creator of

characters, this painter of manners irrevocably past.[2]

David Hume.

David Hume, a younger son of the laird of Ninewells in Berwickshire,

was born in April, 1711. He attended lectures in the University of

Edinburgh at a very early age, and, when about 17, devoted himself

entirely to solitary study, classical, poetical, and philosophic. The

ruling passion of his life was the desire of literary fame, of which,

with all his success, he never obtained more than he wanted. Various

attempts in other professions ended in his return to his studies; he

was only 25 when he wrote his "Treatise of Human Nature," he published

it in 1739; was disappointed by its reception; affected to disavow it,

but reproduced, in more finished literary form, many of its doctrines

in his later essays. The earlier essays, of 1741-1742, were successful:

the Philosophical Essays (1748), were attacked by orthodox divines,

whom the "Essay on Miracles" (of which the central idea occurred to

Hume while arguing with a Jesuit in France) was not apt to conciliate.

Some essays he left for posthumous publication; he was in evil odour

on account of his opinions, and obtained no better post in Scotland

than the keepership of the Advocates' Library. But in Scotland his

geniality, good humour, and practical wisdom, made him dear even to

those who thought his opinions dangerous. By great frugality he made

himself independent of the great, while his "History of England" begun

in 1754, though, like most honest histories it at first offended all

parties, proved not unprofitable and greatly increased his reputation.

In 1765, he was made Secretary of Legation in Paris; later he obtained

the post of Under-Secretary for Home Affairs; and finally returned

to Edinburgh "in opulence," as he said, with £1000 a year. He had

many friends among the preachers of "the Moderate party," and died in

1776, contented, and not without some parade, Dr. Johnson thought, of

his philosophic fearlessness. In Paris he was highly popular; but,

though England had done much for him, he used to express great dislike

of the English. He laboured, none the less, to purge his style of

Scotticisms, of which he drew up a list--"allenarly" and "alongst"

are to be avoided; and he determined to write "a pretty girl enough"

in place of "a pretty enough girl". Hume's philosophical ideas belong

to the history, not of literature, but of philosophy. His position,

in a continuation of Locke, was sceptical, and had immense influence

in causing a reaction and a closer criticism, first in Germany, then

in England. Professor Huxley, Hume's biographer, has exposed many of

the fallacies in his "Essay on Miracles," and others are glaring.

Of "The Natural History of Religion" he wrote unembarrassed by much

knowledge of the subject, for early men, as far as we know, often

reasoned otherwise than Hume thought that they would necessarily

reason. Philosophy and history are always in a state of flux, through

the influence of criticism, of new discoveries, and of historical

documents, with which Hume had little acquaintance. But a study of

modern metaphysics must still begin with the works of Hume, though no

one can go to his History for full and accurate information. Unable,

or reluctant, to speak his mind quite freely, he adopted the ironical

method, without the sometimes elephantine frivolity of Gibbon. Like his

fellow-countryman, Dr. Robertson, he was no enthusiastic worshipper

of the heroes of the Reformation; and, though nothing less than a

Jacobite, he was Tory enough to be tolerant of the Stuart Kings, or

rather to study them in the light of the conditions under which they

lived. It is in the same light that Hume and his philosophy must be

regarded. His letters are among his most interesting works, and his

attack on Macpherson's "Ossian," with his defence of the "Epigoniad,"

the Theban epic of his friend Professor Wilkie, in themselves give a

correct and rather amusing view of his tastes and limitations.

Robertson.

William Robertson (1721-1793) the son of a parish minister in

Midlothian, was also a minister of the Church of Scotland, and the

leader of the moderate party, as against the enthusiastic spiritual

descendants of the Covenanters. The moderates aimed at taste, learning,

and the acquisition of a style free from Scottish idioms. This style

Robertson displayed (1759) in his history of Scotland. A topic could

scarcely be more unpopular than his, the publisher said, but his book

had a very wide success south of the Border, and his later works on the

reign of Charles V. and on American history were not less popular. His

manner is calm, reflective, and studiously destitute of enthusiasm.

Both he and Hume viewed the religious history of their country with a

critical tranquillity very unlike the spirit introduced by Carlyle. His

defect lay, not in the art of clear and definite presentation, but in

limited knowledge of original documents.

Edward Gibbon.

"The old reproach, that no British altars had been erected to the

Muse of History, was recently disproved," says Gibbon, "by the first

performances of Robertson and Hume, the histories of Scotland and

the Stuarts.... The perfect composition, the nervous language, the

well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson, inflamed me to the ambitious hope

that I might one day tread in his footsteps: the calm philosophy, the

careless inimitable beauties of his friend and rival" (Hume) "often

forced me to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and

despair." After ten years' work by Gibbon at his "Decline and Fall

of the Roman Empire" "a letter from Mr. Hume" (1776) "overpaid the

labour, but I have never presumed to accept a place in the triumvirate

of British historians."

The fondness of Caledonian patriotism cannot accept the compliment paid

to Robertson and Hume by the modesty of the author of "The Decline and

Fall". The works of the two Scottish historians, though still very

readable, and distinguished in style, are superseded by histories much

more learned and based on documents not accessible to the Scots. But

the monumental edifice of Gibbon is "a possession for ever".

Born at Putney, early in May, 1737, Edward Gibbon came of an ancient

though not historically distinguished family, whose wealth was impaired

by the connexion of his grandfather with the South Sea Bubble, and by

his father's lack of economy. Gibbon's health, in boyhood, was bad,

and his education irregular: he was a sufferer in an age when "the

schoolboy may have been whipped for misapprehending a passage" (in

Phædrus) "which Bentley could not restore, and which Burman could not

explain". Thus he writes in his Autobiography: in this work he affects

to compose with artless effort, but the rounded periods of his great

book come unbidden to his pen, or rather, he devoted elaborate care to

the six drafts of his memoirs.

In two years passed at Westminster School, Gibbon did not master

Greek and Latin. His next three years were passed in wide desultory

reading, in translation of the classics, and in modern history, which

from boyhood was his passion. Going to Magdalen College, Oxford,

before he was 15, "with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a

doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been

ashamed," he was disgusted by the indolent ignorance of the Fellows of

his college, "decent easy men," at whose table as a gentleman commoner

he dined. In close grammatical study under his tutor he found neither

profit nor pleasure; he lived in or out of Oxford as he pleased; read

Catholic books, professed himself a Catholic--"the offence," says

Blackstone, "amounts to High Treason". It amounted to petty treason;

Gibbon's father removed him from Magdalen to the tuition of Mallet,

a free-thinker, and thence he was carried to Lausanne and the house

of a Calvinist minister, who in two years brought him within the

Presbyterian fold. After such a series of theological adventures it

is not strange that Gibbon's aversion to Christianity declares itself

wherever he has a chance of sneering at that religion. He returned

to England in 1758, after sighing as a lover and obeying as a son,

when his father commanded him to resign his passion for Mademoiselle

Curchod, later Madame Necker, the mother of Madame de Staël. At

Lausanne he had studied very widely and with elaborate organization

of his work: in England he still read, "never handled a gun, seldom

mounted a horse," but devoted himself to his duties as an officer

in the Hampshire militia. Here he acquired some practical knowledge

of military affairs which was valuable to him in his remarks on the

discipline of the Roman Army: he meditated several historical topics;

returned to the Continent, and at Rome (15 October, 1764) conceived,

as he has told us in imperishable words, the idea of writing "The

Decline and Fall," "as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol,

while the bare-footed friars were singing Vespers in the temple of

Jupiter". The distractions of society, and of politics, for he had a

seat in Parliament, and belonged to White's, Boodle's, Brooks's and The

Club of Dr. Johnson, did not draw Gibbon from his great ambition. He

had studied style till, in conversation, "his polish was occasionally

finical... he moved to flutes and hautboys". George Colman the Younger

has left a portrait of Gibbon in verse, which is corroborated, as far

as his manner in conversation went, by a letter of his own (1764).

His person looked as funnily obese

As if a Pagod, growing large as Man,

Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece,

To visit a Chinese upon a fan.

Such his exterior, curious 'twas to scan!

And oft he rapped his snuff-box, cocked his snout,

And ere his polished periods he began,

Bent forwards, stretching his forefinger out,

And talked in phrase as round as he was round about.

Roundness, meditated balance, are the characteristics of Gibbon's

style. "Before he wrote a note or a letter he arranged completely in

his mind what he wished to express." He says: "It has always been my

practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it in my

ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of my pen

till I had given the last polish to my work". As one consequence, "my

first rough manuscript, without any intermediate copy, has been sent

to the press". Gibbon's History, in the vast whole, as well as in each

sentence, was thus premeditated, under his ruling philosophic idea of

what such a history should be. He had completely assimilated his mass

of materials, and each topic was reduced to its proper dimensions,

without encumbering details, while all marched to the flutes and

hautboys of his rounded music. We may think it occasionally monotonous,

and marvel that so many periods should conclude with a clause

introduced by the preposition "of". But this is a trifling criticism,

he had chosen his vehicle; and, though we should not imitate his style,

yet a style it is, admirably adapted to its purpose. His reading was

enormous in every branch of learning, including the science of coins;

he constantly refers "to the medals as well as the historians". It may

be curious to note that while he devotes four pages to the criticism

of the iron cage of Bajazet (1402) he neglects to mention that such

cages or _huches_ were commonly used for the safeguarding of important

prisoners of war by the contemporary chivalry of France and England.

It is, of course, impossible, it would not be easy for the most learned

of historians, to criticize in a few words a historical work of such

vast survey, and concerned with so many and such various topics,

with the affairs of so many races and religions, throughout so many

centuries. The faults which have been chiefly criticized are Gibbon's

total inability to be generous towards Christianity; and the bad taste

of some of his notes; which appear to be the refreshments of a natural

fatigue. In his day, he says, "History was the most popular species of

composition," and he "is at a loss how to describe the success of the

work, without betraying the vanity of the writer". He ended his task,

and he has described his emotions when all was done, on 27 June, 1787,

at Lausanne, the place of his boyish exile and of his solitary affair

of the heart. He died in 1794, having been mainly busy with the drafts

of his Autobiography. These drafts, with his most interesting letters,

have been published by the piety of the Earl of Sheffield, the grandson

of his devoted friend, John Holroyd, first Lord Sheffield. In his early

letters Gibbon is no purist, "I tipped the boy with a crown," he says,

an early use of a familiar modern term.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), like Burke and Goldsmith, was

an Irishman by birth; his family provided Prince Charles, in Sir

Thomas Sheridan, with a most inefficient tutor, and an unfortunate

comrade in war. Sheridan's own family was Protestant, his grandfather

was a friend of Dean Swift in Ireland, and a humorist. His son,

though in Dr. Johnson's set, was regarded by the great lexicographer

as a prodigy of natural dullness, highly cultivated and improved

by art. Educated at Harrow, young Richard never gave any cause for

the complaint that he was dull. At twenty-one he eloped from Bath

with the beautiful Miss Linley, a charming singer, the Saint Cecilia

of Reynolds's painting. In 1775, Sheridan produced "The Rivals" at

Covent Garden; one of the few plays of the eighteenth century which

still live on the stage, and perhaps can never cease to amuse, thanks

to Mrs. Malaprop's exquisitely well-chosen derangement of epithets,

and the unexpected variety of her parts of speech. Malapropisms may

be styled a mechanical form of humour, but Mrs. Malaprop's own are

happily expressive of her character. To know Lydia Languish is to love

her; and Sir Lucius O'Trigger scarcely caricatures the ideas of his

duelling fellow-countrymen; whilst Bob Acres is the most sympathetic

of all the comic poltroons of the stage, though too sanguine in his

belief that "damns have had their day". Sir Anthony Absolute is a

delightful variation on the stock character of the Angry Father; and

these diverting figures make the sentimental parts of the serious

lovers, Falkland and Julia, rather ungrateful. "The School for Scandal"

may be called conventional in the contrast of hypocrisy and reckless

goodness of heart in Joseph and Charles Surface; but convention is

permitted to the stage, while Sir Peter and Lady Teazle, with the happy

high spirits of the whole farcical comedy, and the varieties in the

candour of the scandal-mongers, make the play at least the rival of

"The Rivals," as it is far more provocative of mirth than the wit of

Congreve. "The Critic," again, in its delicious nonsense and satire

of authors, actors, and critics--Sir Fretful Plagiary is as diverting

as realistic--infinitely surpasses its old model, "The Rehearsal".

We laugh aloud as we read, and are convulsed as we look on when the

piece is acted. Who forgets the nod of Lord Burleigh in the drama of

the Armada, and the exquisite reason for which the characters cannot

behold the galleons of Spain, and the romantic demeanour of the two

Tilburinas, and the Governor who remains fixed, while the Father is

moved? Of Sheridan's other plays "St. Patrick's Day" is not seen on the

stage, while "The Duenna" does not "attain unto the first Three".

As manager and owner of Drury Lane Theatre, Sheridan proved himself to

be not more skilled in finance than Balzac; in debt always, he somehow

kept afloat. You would have said that "he was not the stuff they make

Whigs of"; any more than Charles Fox. In Parliament, however (1780), he

attached himself to that statesman's party; attacked Warren Hastings,

and amused the Prince of Wales (George IV.) who certainly appreciated

literary genius, from Sheridan and Scott to Miss Austen.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Born a Pierrepont, daughter of the Earl of Kingston (1689-1762) and

wife of Edward Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, a toast at eight, lived

through the great age of Anne and Pope, her absurd admirer before he

was her shameless satirist. She was equally celebrated for her beauty,

her wit, and her introduction of inoculation against small-pox, from

Constantinople, where her husband was English ambassador (1716).

Her light verses are sparkling and malicious; her fame rests on her

letters, from the East, from England among the wits, to her sister

(who married the Jacobite Earl of Mar, and lived in France), and, in

later life, to Lady Bute, from Avignon, with its Jacobite colony,

and from Italy, where she read and remarked on the great novelists

of the day. Even Walpole's letters are scarcely more entertaining,

and more brilliant records of society in the eighteenth century do

not exist. Lady Mary was not sentimental, and laughed at Pope's

lightning-stricken lovers; or rather at the artificiality of Pope's

sentiment concerning them.

Junius.

_Stat Nominis Umbra._ Because we do not know who wrote the letters of

political invective signed "Junius," and published by Woodfall in "The

Public Advertiser" (1768-1773), much has been written about the mystery

of the author's identity. From Sir Philip Francis (who seems to be the

favourite, like Matthioli for the Man in the Iron Maskship) to the

wicked Lord Lyttelton and Edward Gibbon, there have been about a score

of candidates. Matthioli was certainly not the Man in the Iron Mask,

and perhaps Sir Philip Francis was not Junius, who gives himself--very

cleverly if he were Sir Philip,--the air of being some great one. The

letters, except to the professed historian, are repulsive. The worst

quality of satire, spite masquerading as virtuous indignation, is their

chief characteristic, their style is that of antithetical rhetoric,

highly inflated; their subject is party politics and personal invective.

[1] There was scarce a literary form which he did not touch, none which

he touched did he fail to adorn.

[2] The writer observes that Sterne is unmentioned in Mr. Pancoast's

"Introduction to English Literature," Third Edition, Enlarged, New

York, 1907. "Alas, poor Yorick!"

CHAPTER XXXII.

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT.

Coleridge.

The so-called Romantic Movement in the English Literature of the early

nineteenth century, was, first, the result of a tendency to expansion

in every conceivable direction. There was delight in the freedom of

the open air and of Nature: in the late seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, most men who were not fox hunters were devoted to "the

stuffy business of living in houses," and passed the greater part of

the day in coffee houses and taverns, drinking wine, tea, chocolate,

and ceaselessly conversing. The fat Georgian faces of Hume and Gibbon,

the early corpulence and early gout are indications of the life led,

when they could afford it, by men of letters. "The Return to Nature,"

in poetry implied a reaction against these habits.

Politically, there was, in connexion with the French Revolution,

expansion in the direction of Universal Brotherhood. "Be my Brother or

I will cut your throat" (_Sois mon frère, ou je te tue_) was the motto

of extreme philanthropists.

It's comin' yet for a' that

That man to man the world o'er

Shall brithers be for a' that,

wrote Burns while the guillotine was in the making, and the thunder was

approaching of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

These emotions of hope for the near future entered, no less than the

love and study of Nature, into the Romantic literature, and the minds

of the poets also expanded in theological and mystical speculation,

half German, half in the style of Greek Platonic philosophy.

The sentiment of human unity also turned to the past; history

was revivified; mediaeval art was appreciated; chivalry was an

ideal--and a very excellent ideal, were human nature capable--of

carrying it into practice. Verse was emancipated, all that Goldsmith

protested against,--sonnets, blank verse, happy negligence,

"anapests"--flourished, and the characteristics of the new age were

variously illustrated by men all born within some five years of each

other, in the north or the south, William Wordsworth (1770), Walter

Scott (1771), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772), Robert Southey (1774),

and Charles Lamb (1775), to whom we may add Walter Landor (1775).

Of these the most inspiring influence was probably that of the man who

produced the least in bulk of great literature, Coleridge. He was,

as it were, the Socrates of the time, the talker. Coleridge was born

at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary, in the Devonshire which Herrick

and Keats so much disliked, on 21 October, 1772. His father, the Rev.

John Coleridge, was vicar and master of the Grammar School, and for

goodness, learning, and ignorance of the world was compared by his son

to Fielding's Parson Adams. Coleridge describes himself as a dreamy

child, useless at games, "timorous, and a tell-tale," "despising most

boys of my own age". "You can't think how ignorant these boys are!"

said Scott, when asked, as a child, why he was not playing with his

little neighbours. Like R. L. Stevenson, Coleridge suffered from night

fears and visions of fever, born of "The Arabian Nights". He "had seen

too many ghosts to believe in them". After the death of his father, who

appreciated him, Coleridge went to Christ's Hospital in London (1782),

and Lamb has described his life, and his early home-sickness at that

painfully Spartan academy. Though he revived

by internal light,

The trees, the meadows, and his native stream,

while a schoolboy Coleridge's spirits were high; he made friends

enough, Charles Lamb being the first; read widely; dipped,

like other curious boys, into the dreams of the post-Christian

Neoplatonists,--Iamblichus, the great authority on spiritualism, and

Plotinus, so good in parts--and adored, at 17, the Twenty Sonnets of

the Rev. Mr. Bowles (1762-1850), afterwards the opponent of Byron in

the question "Was Pope a poet?" Bowles, at all events, handed the

torch of non-Popeian poetry to Coleridge, who won scholarships and

exhibitions that maintained him at Jesus College, Cambridge (1791).

Here he met Wordsworth of St. John's, already a printed poet, at a

meeting of an Essay Society. But Coleridge had not written his essay!

He now fled from Cambridge "to be a dragoon," which did not suit his

genius. He returned to Cambridge: visited Oxford in 1794, met Southey

of Balliol, and with him made a plan to migrate with kindred souls to

the States, and found a pantisocratic society, wherein all should be

brothers and equals. Coleridge was as fit to be a farming colonist as

Mr. Micawber, and, being just off with one love, he presently engaged

himself to another, Miss Sara Fricker, a sister of Southey's bride.

Coleridge at this time wrote a good deal of verse and described his

own hand as "graspless"; his genius as "sloth-jaundiced all," while,

elsewhere, he spoke of his "fat vacuity of face," an eighteenth century

face, with full lax lips, redeemed by dark intelligent eyes. Coleridge

was

Like some bold seer in a trance

Seeing all his own mischance.

He left Cambridge without a degree, married on the prospects of his

poetry; started a weekly serial, "The Watchman," and (1796) published

"Poems". Some of them were written at school; many of them are full of

Gray's allegorical figures, one, "Religious Musings" in blank verse,

is on the Nativity and the evils of Society, others are imitative of

Bowles, an "Ode to a Young Jackass," is reminiscent of Sterne's donkey.

Perhaps some stanzas named "Lewti, or the Circassian Love-chaunt" alone

suggest the essential qualities of Coleridge.

In 1796-1797, Coleridge took a cottage at Stowey: "The Light shall

stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage window". He was

busy with an unfinished poem on Jeanne d'Arc, in blank verse (fragments

appear in "The Destiny of Nations"). He represented her as seeing her

Saints first when of the age of 20, to which she never attained: her

eyebrows were "wildly haired". The Voices, in Coleridge, spoke to

Jeanne about the Pacific Ocean, the Protoplast, Leviathan, and kindred

matters, not much in her way. Jeanne has suffered as much at the hands

of poets as from her French judges. Lamb induced Coleridge to abandon

these absurdities.

In midsummer, 1797, Coleridge met Wordsworth and his "exquisite

sister," Dorothy, who paid a visit to Stowey, and settled near him. A

play, "Osorio," was not accepted for the stage: the two poets formed

various projects of collaboration, one resulted in "The Ancient

Mariner" (March, 1798) the quintessence of romance. In 1798 Coleridge

met and carried captive Hazlitt, who later broke his bonds with a glee

and fury unworthy of him. By this time, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge

had made experiments in opium, of which the bondage was never broken.

In 1798 the famous volume, "Lyrical Ballads," by Coleridge and

Wordsworth, challenged the world with Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy" and

"Tintern Abbey," examples of the opposite poles of his genius; with

"The Ancient Mariner," among other things. In 1798-1799 Coleridge was

studying in Germany, absorbing philosophies: in 1800 he removed with

his family to Greta Hall near Keswick, or to Windermere, while the

Wordsworths were at Grasmere; hence the name of the Lake Poets.

Coleridge was now working at the second part of the

never-to-be-finished "Christabel," begun at Stowey. Sir John Stoddart

read or repeated some stanzas of "Christabel" to Scott, who followed

the metres of Coleridge in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805).

Coleridge (who did not publish "Christabel," and the extraordinary

fragment composed in sleep "Kubla Khan," with "The Pains of Sleep,"

till 1816) was not unjustifiably annoyed by the anticipation, of his

metre, which was not new, but was first used by Coleridge in romantic

poetry. Scott seems to have been quite unconscious of sin.

Despite the large number of Coleridge's poems, it is generally

confessed that only "The Ancient Mariner," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan,"

"Love,"

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

"Youth and Age" (1822-1832), "Time, Real and Imaginary," with

"Dejection" (an ode, 1802), and parts of "France" (an ode, 1798)

represent that in the poet which was absolutely his, and his alone. The

vision, supernaturally clear, the music, the glow, the strange beauty,

are present in these poems, things inimitable and unequalled. Coleridge

was always a "teacher" and had been a Unitarian preacher: his early

poems are constantly didactic, but, in his poems which live, there is

no "lesson" (unless we regard "The Ancient Mariner" as a tract for

the prevention of cruelty to animals). The great poems appear to have

been given to him in flashes of vision, as "Kubla Khan" certainly was

given in sleep, and broken by the arrival of "a person from Porlock"

on business. It is fairly apparent that "Christabel" had its germ in

a brief vision of the meeting of the innocent heroine with a being

beautiful and horrible,

I guess,'twas _frightful_ there to see

A lady so richly clad as she--

Beautiful exceedingly.

We may even conjecture at the close of the vision, a thing so grotesque

as well as terrible, that the poem could never find a conclusion.

It is not clear that Coleridge's poems had much effect on those of

younger contemporaries. Without Coleridge, Shelley would have written

as he did write; if anything by Keats is influenced by Coleridge it is

"La Belle Dame sans Merci". To Scott, Coleridge gave only the idea of

the metre of "Christabel". In close intimacy Coleridge and Wordsworth

stimulated each other. In other respects Coleridge's critical and

philosophical ideas welled from him in lectures, orally delivered;

his Shakespearean criticism was of the highest merit in spiritual

appreciation. In "The Friend," an unsuccessful and unexhilarating

periodical; in his "Biographia Literaria" (1817-1818) which is not

so biographical or so literary as it is reflective, and critical of

Hartley's philosophy and Wordsworth's poems, he is too discursive to

be easily read; and the systematic works on philosophy about which he

dreamed and talked were never produced.

His life, after his visit to Italy and Malta in 1804-1806, was

desultory; his friendship with the Wordsworths was interrupted; Lamb,

always true to him, could describe him as "a damaged Archangel";

Hazlitt, furious with Coleridge's later conservatism, insulted his

"Christabel" in the "Edinburgh Review": and declared that the praises

given to it by Scott and Byron were inspired by desire of praise from

Coleridge. From 1816 to his death in 1834 Coleridge lived quietly and

more happily with Mr. Gillman at Hampstead, much visited by people

who hoped to be instructed as well as charmed by his conversation, or

rather by his monologues.

In 1820 Keats met him and walked two miles with him. "He

broached a thousand things--nightingales, poetry--on poetical

sensation--metaphysics, different genera and species of dreams--a dream

accompanied by a sense of touch, a dream related--first and second

consciousness--the difference explained between will and volition--so

say metaphysicians from a want of smoking" (that is detecting) "the

second consciousness--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids, Southey believed

in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story!"

"The second consciousness" may be the "subconsciousness" or "subliminal

self" of modern psychologists. "He is a kind good soul," says the

sardonic Carlyle, "full of religion and affection, and poetry and

animal magnetism." Scott met "this extraordinary man" at dinner.

Coleridge (after dinner) lectured on the Samothracian Mysteries as

the origin of all fairy tales; and on the "Iliad" as a miscellany

contributed to by many authors during a century. "Zounds, I never was

so bethumped with words."

Walter Scott.

Sir Walter Scott, descended from the Harden branch of the great clan

that had kept the Marches through centuries of English wars, was born

in Edinburgh on 15 August, 1771. Neither from his father (the father

of Allan Fairford, in "Redgauntlet") nor from his mother, of another

Border clan, the Rutherfords, can he be supposed to have drawn his

genius, though Mrs. Scott appreciated literature. In early childhood a

mysterious malady inflicted on him a life-long lameness, in contrast

with his great physical strength, and his preference for the profession

of arms. His early childhood was passed in the heart of the Borders,

at Smailholme tower, overlooking Tweed, Teviot, and the scenes of a

hundred battles. The old ballads were his earliest reading, and tales

of Prince Charles's war, told by veterans of the Forty-five, his great

delight. At school he flashed from end to end of the form, rising by

his general information, and falling by his indifference to grammar.

He was an omnivorous reader, forgetting nothing, a teller of tales, a

roamer on foot through the country-side, and he left the High School

of Edinburgh, quite Greekless, for the University,--where he learned

no Greek. But of Latin, including mediaeval Latin, he had enough for

his purposes (his quotations show indifference to quantity and metre);

and French, Italian, and German he acquired for the purpose of reading

their poetry and romances. His native appreciation of verse astonished

people in his childhood; love of the past was his dominant passion; and

in nature the historical memories of places were even more to him than

natural beauty.

After the customary training in his father's office, he was called to

the Scottish Bar, enjoying little practice, but making friends in every

rank, and enduring a disappointment in love, by which his heart, though

fairly mended by his marriage in 1797, to a Miss Charpentier, was

broken but not embittered.

His earliest published verses were translations from German ballads,

including the famous "Lenore" of Bürger, and he published a translation

of the "Götz von Berlichingen" of Goethe. These essays attracted little

attention: more was paid to such imitations of the old ballads as

"Glenfinlas," and "Cadzow," and "The Eve of St. John," abounding in

poetic spirit, though not archaic in diction.

He obtained a long-deferred reversion of a place as Clerk in the

Parliament House, and the Sheriffship of Selkirkshire (the Forest of

Ettrick) where in summer he resided, first at Ashestiel on Tweed, the

centre of the beauties and legends of the Border. In yearly raids into

almost roadless Liddesdale, he learned to know the Dandie Dinmonts, and

collected the traditions, and the ballads of "The Border Minstrelsy,"

of which the first edition, with copious historical and antiquarian

notes, was published in 1802.

The famous False Alarm of invasion of 1803, described in "The

Antiquary," sent him on a ride of a hundred miles, to Dalkeith, the

house of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, and the trysting-place

of the Borderers. A command of the Duchess suggested a ballad on

a tradition of a goblin page; parts of Coleridge's unpublished

"Christabel," which he had heard recited, gave the model of the

irregular octosyllabic verse, and in 1805 the result, "The Lay of the

Last Minstrel," made Scott by far the most popular of poets. "The Lay"

was the most spontaneous, and in many ways the best, of his romances

in verse. "Marmion" (1808) more studied, more tragical, and fortunate

in the magnificent canto on the battle of Flodden: and "The Lady of

the Lake" (1810), with its blending of Highland and Lowland characters

and scenes in the reign of James V. (about 1535) only confirmed his

popularity and success. "Rokeby" (1812) was, despite its excellent

songs, and a highly Byronic outlaw preceding Byron, less favourably

received; and "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), on the adventures of

Bruce, a subject long meditated, was not saved by its battle of

Bannockburn, a fight only inferior to the Flodden of "Marmion". Byron,

with his modern romance and his living celebrity, had defeated the

historical Muse; and Scott did not put forth his strength in "Harold

the Dauntless" and "The Bridal of Triermain".

He was the best judge of his own poetry, written "for young people

of spirit," he said, though he did not allow his own young people to

read it; a deprivation which they took very unconcernedly. It is not

to Scott's poetry, except in some of his lyrics, that we look for deep

reflection on human destinies, or for delicate subtlety of phrase,

All the charm of all the Muses

Often flowering in a lonely word.

His reflections he kept to himself; he told his story in his galloping

"light horseman" style of verse; he made the dead past live again; he

repeopled with their dreams the roofless towers of the Borders, the

Highland caves and bothies, the deserted palaces and castles, whose

last native king was then dying, a priest, in Rome. His verses, read

aloud to Wellington's men in Spain, inspirited them in the charge, as

they awoke among all men what had long been slumbering, the love of

poetry. Scott, like Yama, the first of men who died, "opened a pathway

unto many": inclined men to give an ear to verse. He set Byron the

model for his popular versified tales of Oriental adventure; and he was

unceasing in recommending the poetry, so unlike his own, of Wordsworth,

and in applauding Byron with unfeigned generosity; while his devotion

to the old English drama displays itself in quotations in his prose,

and in imitations, improvised chapter-headings, in his novels. From his

first translations of ballads, to the snatches sung by Madge Wildfire,

the song of "Proud Maisie," and the ringing lyric of "Bonnie Dundee,"

he first awoke and then kept vigilant the spirit of ancient popular

minstrelsy.

In short his poetry was such as came to a man of his genius, during his

"grand gallops among the hills, while he was thinking of 'Marmion'".

His laxities in form are, indeed, less glaring than those of Byron,

but, from the first, were conspicuous to himself and to his critics.

His appeal to names of hill and loch and sea-strait, rivers and burns

and towers and glens, makes half of his charm in the ears of those to

whom the places are dear and familiar. _He_ was "the latest minstrel,"

the Homer, the creative and unifying successor of many nameless men who

left great verse unto a little clan. Above all he was a narrator, at

story-teller, a creator of characters, a Humorist, and his essential

genius, his dramatic gift, his knowledge of the past and the present,

found its true vehicle in the prose of his novels.

Scott's career falls naturally into two parts: first from the

"Minstrelsy" (1802) to "The Lord of the Isles" (1815), and next from

"Waverley" (1814) to the authors death in 1832. But in the earlier

years were sown the seeds of disaster; Scott had, before 1813,

been entangled in financial troubles, owing to his association

with the printing and publishing affairs of his old friends, James

and John Ballantyne. Despite his common sense, Scott was sanguine

and unpractical as a publisher; his enterprises were dominated by

preferences, personal or antiquarian; his hospitality and his tastes

were expensive, and his associates were not the men to control and

direct him; or even to keep the commercial books of the concern. In

fact shipwreck, once at least, seemed inevitable, before Scott struck a

vein of fairy gold in prose romance.

Before speaking of Scott as a novelist it should be said that he was

the most copious, various, and readable of the critics and general

writers of his time. His great edition of Dryden, now reinforced by

the notes of Mr. Saintsbury, still holds its ground, in despite of

the contempt of Leigh Hunt; and his "Life of Swift" is still the

most valuable, for the judgment of so sane and generous a mind on

the mystery of Swift's character and career. Scott's many essays,

collected from periodicals, mainly from "The Quarterly Review," which

he practically founded, are treasures of information and anecdote. His

criticism for example in the "Lives of the Novelists" errs most in the

direction of generosity. His "Tales of a Grandfather," written for

his little grandson, John Lockhart, who died in childhood, combines

delightful versions of historic legends of early times with the most

impartial treatment of such difficult and disputable periods as the

Reformation and the age of the Covenant. Scott had strong sentimental

leanings towards Mary Stuart, the Cavaliers, and the Jacobites, but,

in writing history for the young, he deliberately corrected his bias.

A life of Mary Stuart he refused to write, because his reason was at

variance with his feelings. His "Napoleon" was a piece of task-work,

executed with cruel rapidity, and, of course, he had not access to many

sources of information now open. Of course, too, like any man who had

lived through the Napoleonic wars, he was a partisan, in his case of

his country's party. But he did not carry political partisanship into

literature; he had no part (despite ignorant assertions) in the attacks

on "the Cockney School"; he tried to tempt Charles Lamb to visit him at

Abbotsford; and he seized an opportunity of applauding Mrs. Shelley's

"Frankenstein" because he believed it to be by Shelley.

William Wordsworth.

The contrast between the friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, was that

which poets observe between the South and the North. The child of

the soft enervating air of Devonshire, Coleridge, according to his

own early diagnosis already quoted, had every other gift, mental and

moral, but lacked energy and resolution, his hand was "graspless".

Wordsworth, on the contrary (born at Cockermouth, 7 April, 1770) was a

child of the North and of the Border, and a grandchild of Dorothy, born

Crackanthorp, a member of a family which, in the old Border laws, is

named among the Watchers of the Fords, against the Scottish raiders.

To a genius as great if not as diversified as Coleridge's, Wordsworth

united an iron will to be a poet and, as he said, "a teacher,". With

the keenest love of universal nature from the mountains and the storms

to "the meanest flower that blows," he combined that sense of unity

with Nature, and with "something still more deeply interfused," which

Coleridge speaks of in a poem (1795) composed before he and Wordsworth

became intimate. Says Coleridge

O the one life within us and abroad,

Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,

A light in sound, a soundlike power in light,

Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere.

Coleridge adds that when he lies at midday on the side of a hill, his

fancies traverse his brain