IV

(1739-1763)

I am now to speak of the quarter of a century which succeeded the fall

of Walpole, and includes two singularly contrasted periods. Walpole's

fall meant the accession to power of the heterogeneous body of statesmen

whose virtuous indignation had been raised by his corrupt practices.

Some of them, as Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, were men of great

ability; but, after a series of shifting combinations and personal

intrigues, the final result was the triumph of the Pelhams--the

grotesque Duke of Newcastle and his brother, who owed their success

mainly to skill in the art of parliamentary management. The opposition

had ousted Walpole by taking advantage of the dumb instinct which

impelled us to go to war with Spain; and distracted by the interests of

Hanover and the balance of power we had plunged into that complicated

series of wars which lasted for some ten years, and passes all powers

of the ordinary human intellect to understand or remember. For what

particular reason Englishmen were fighting at Dettingen or Fontenoy or

Lauffeld is a question which a man can only answer when he has been

specially crammed for examination and his knowledge has not begun to

ooze out; while the abnormal incapacity of our rulers was displayed at

the attack upon Carthagena or during the Pretender's march into England.

The history becomes a shifting chaos marked by no definite policy, and

the ship of State is being steered at random as one or other of the

competitors for rule manages to grasp the helm for a moment. Then after

another period of aimless intrigues the nation seems to rouse itself;

and finding at last a statesman who has a distinct purpose and can

appeal to a great patriotic sentiment, takes the leading part in Europe,

wins a series of victories, and lays the foundation of the British

Empire in America and India. Under Walpole's rule the House of Commons

had become definitely the dominant political body. The minister who

could command it was master of the position. The higher aristocracy are

still in possession of great influence, but they are ceasing to be the

adequate representatives of the great political forces. They are in the

comfortable position of having completely established their own

privileges; and do not see any reason for extending privileges to

others. Success depends upon personal intrigues among themselves and

upon a proper manipulation of the Lower House which, though no overt

constitutional change has taken place, is coming to be more decidedly

influenced by the interests of the moneyed men and the growing middle

classes. Pitt and Newcastle represent the two classes which are coming

into distinct antagonism. Pitt's power rested upon the general national

sentiment. 'You have taught me,' as George II. said to him, 'to look for

the sense of my people in other places than the House of Commons.' The

House of Commons, that is, should not derive its whole authority from

the selfish interest of the borough-mongers but from the great outside

current of patriotic sentiment and aspiration. But public opinion was

not yet powerful enough to support the great minister without an

alliance with the master of the small arts of intrigue. The general

sentiments of discontent which had been raised by Walpole was therefore

beginning to widen and deepen and to take a different form. The root of

the evil, as people began to feel, was not in the individual Walpole but

in the system which he represented. Brown's _Estimate_ is often noticed

in illustration. Brown convinced his readers, as Macaulay puts it, that

they were a race of cowards and scoundrels, who richly deserved the fate

in store for them of being speedily enslaved by their enemies; and the

prophecy was published (1757) on the eve of the most glorious war we had

ever known. It represents also, as Macaulay observes, the indignation

roused by the early failures of the war and the demand that Pitt should

take the helm. Brown was a very clever, though not a very profound,

writer. A similar and more remarkable utterance had been made some years

before (1749) by the remarkable thinker, David Hartley. The world, he

said, was in the most critical state ever known. He attributes the evil

to the growth of infidelity in the upper classes; their general

immorality; their sordid self-interest, which was almost the sole motive

of action of the ministers; the contempt for authority of all their

superiors; the worldly-mindedness of the clergy and the general

carelessness as to education. These sentiments are not the mere

platitudes, common to moralists in all ages. They are pointed and

emphasised by the state of political and social life in the period.

Besides the selfishness and want of principle of the upper classes, one

fact upon which Hartley insists is sufficiently familiar. The Church it

is obvious had been paralysed. It had no corporate activity; it was in

thorough subjection to the aristocracy; the highest preferments were to

be won by courting such men as Newcastle, and not by learning or by

active discharge of duty; and the ordinary parson, though he might be

thoroughly respectable and amiable, was dependant upon the squire as his

superior upon the ministers. He took things easily enough to verify

Hartley's remarks. We must infer from later history that a true

diagnosis would not have been so melancholy as Hartley supposed. The

nation was not corrupt at the core. It was full of energy; and rapidly

developing in many directions. The upper classes, who had gained all

they wanted, were comfortable and irresponsible; not yet seriously

threatened by agitators; able to carry on a traffic in sinecures and

pensions, and demoralised as every corporate body becomes demoralised

which has no functions to discharge in proportion to capacities. The

Church naturally shared the indolence of its rulers and patrons. Hartley

exhorts the clergy to take an example from the energy of the Methodists

instead of abusing them. Wesley had begun his remarkable missionary

career in 1738, and the rapid growth of his following is a familiar

proof on the one side of the indolence of the established authorities,

and on the other of the strength of the demand for reform in classes to

which he appealed. If, that is, the clergy were not up to their duties,

Wesley's success shows that there was a strong sense of existing moral

and social evils which only required an energetic leader to form a

powerful organisation. I need not attempt to inquire into the causes of

the Wesleyan and Evangelical movement, but must note one

characteristic--it had not an intellectual but a sound moral origin.

Wesley takes his creed for granted, and it was the creed, so far as they

had one, of the masses of the nation. He is shocked by perjury,

drunkenness, corruption, and so forth, but has not seriously to meet

scepticism of the speculative variety. If Wesley did not, like the

leader of another Oxford movement, feel bound to clear up the logical

basis of his religious beliefs, he had of course to confront deism, but

could set it down as a mere product of moral indifference. When Hartley,

like Butler, speaks of the general unbelief of the day, he was no doubt

correct within limits. In the upper social sphere the tone was

sceptical. Not only Bolingbroke but such men as Chesterfield and Walpole

were indifferent or contemptuous. They were prepared to go with

Voltaire's development of the English rationalism. But the English

sceptic of the upper classes was generally a Gallio. He had no desire to

propagate his creed, still less to attack the Church, which was a

valuable part of his property; it never occurred to him that scepticism

might lead to a political as well as an ecclesiastical revolution.

Voltaire was not intentionally destructive in politics, whatever the

real effect of his teaching; but he was an avowed and bitter enemy of

the Church and the orthodox creed. Hume, the great English sceptic, was

not only a Tory in politics but had no desire to affect the popular

belief. He could advise a clergyman to preach the ordinary doctrines,

because it was paying far too great a compliment to the vulgar to be

punctilious about speaking the truth to them. A similar indifference is

characteristic of the whole position. The select classes were to be

perfectly convinced that the accepted creed was superstitious; but they

were not for that reason to attack it. To the statesman, as Gibbon was

to point out, a creed is equally useful, true or false; and the English

clergy, though bound to use orthodox language, were far too well in hand

to be regarded as possible persecutors. Even in Scotland they made no

serious attempt to suppress Hume; he had only to cover his opinions by

some decent professions of belief. One symptom of the general state of

mind is the dying out of the deist controversies. The one great divine,

according to Brown's _Estimate_, was Warburton, the colossus, he says,

who bestrides the world: and Warburton, whatever else he may have been,

was certainly of all divines the one whose argument is most palpably

fictitious, if not absolutely insincere. He marks, however, the tendency

of the argument to become historical. Like a much acuter writer, Conyers

Middleton, he is occupied with the curious problem: how do we reconcile

the admission that miracles never happen with the belief that they once

happened?--or are the two beliefs reconcilable? That means, is history

continuous? But it also means that the problems of abstract theology

were passing out of sight, and that speculation was turning to the

historical and scientific problems. Hartley was expounding the

association principle which became the main doctrine of the empirical

school, and Hume was teaching ethics upon the same basis, and turning

from speculation to political history. The main reason of this

intellectual indifference was the social condition under which the

philosophical theory found no strong current of political discontent

with which to form an alliance. The middle classes, which are now

growing in strength and influence, had been indifferent to the

discussions going on above their heads. The more enlightened clergy had,

of course, been engaged in the direct controversy, and had adopted a

kind of mild common-sense rationalism which implied complete

indifference to the dogmatic disputes of the preceding century. The

Methodist movement produced a little revival of the Calvinist and

Arminian controversy. But the beliefs of the great mass of the

population were not materially affected: they held by sheer force of

inertia to the old traditions, and still took themselves to be good

orthodox Protestants, though they had been unconsciously more affected

by the permeation of rationalism than they realised.

So much must be said, because the literary work was being more and more

distinctly addressed to the middle class. The literary profession is now

taking more of the modern form. Grub Street is rapidly becoming

respectable, and its denizens--as Beauclerk said of Johnson when he got

his pension--will be able to 'purge and live cleanly like gentlemen.'

Johnson's incomparable letter (1755) rejecting Chesterfield's attempt to

impose his patronage, is the familiar indication of the change. Johnson

had been labouring in the employment of the booksellers, and always,

unlike some more querulous authors, declares that they were fair and

liberal patrons--though it is true that he had to knock down one of them

with a folio. Other writers of less fame can turn an honest penny by

providing popular literature of the heavier kind. There is a demand for

'useful information.' There was John Campbell, for example, the 'richest

author,' said Johnson, who ever grazed 'the common of literature,' who

contributed to the _Modern Universal History_, the _Biographica

Britannica_, and wrote the _Lives of the Admirals_ and the _Political

Survey of Great Britain_, and innumerable historical and statistical

works; and the queer adventurer Sir John Hill, who turned out book after

book with marvellous rapidity and impudence, and is said to have really

had some knowledge of botany. The industrious drudges and clever

charlatans could make a respectable income. Smollett is a superior

example, whose 'literary factory,' as it has been said, 'was in full

swing' at this period, and who, besides his famous novels, was

journalist, historian, and author of all work, and managed to keep

himself afloat, though he also contrived to exceed his income and was

supported by a number of inferior 'myrmidons' who helped to turn out his

hackwork. He describes the author's position in a famous passage in

_Humphry Clinker_ (1756). Smollett also started the _Critical Review_ in

rivalry to the _Monthly Review_, begun by Griffiths a few years before

(1749), and these two were for a long time the only precursors to the

_Edinburgh Review_, and marked an advance upon the old _Gentleman's

Magazine_. In other words, we have the beginning of a new tribunal or

literary Star Chamber. The author has not to inquire what is said of his

performances in the coffee-houses, where the Wits gathered under the

presidency of Addison or Swift. The professional critic has appeared

who will make it his regular business to give an account of all new

books, and though his reviews are still comparatively meagre and apt to

be mere analyses, it is implied that a kind of public opinion is growing

up which will decide upon his merits, and upon which his success or

failure will depend. That means again that the readers to whom he is to

appeal are mainly the middle class, who are not very highly cultivated,

but who have at any rate reached the point of reading their newspaper

and magazine regularly, and buy books enough to make it worth while to

supply the growing demand. The nobleman has ceased to consider the

patronage of authors as any part of his duty, and the tradition which

made him consider writing poetry as a proper accomplishment is dying

out. Since that time our aristocracy as such has been normally

illiterate. Peers--Byron, for example--have occasionally written books;

and more than one person of quality has, like Fox, kept up the interest

in classical literature which he acquired at a public school, and added

a charm to his parliamentary oratory. The great man, too, as I have

said, could take his chance in political writing, and occasionally

condescend to show his skill at an essay of the _Spectator_ model. But a

certain contempt for the professional writer is becoming characteristic,

even of men like Horace Walpole, who have a real taste for literature.

He is inclined to say, as Chesterfield put it in a famous speech, 'We,

my lords, may thank Heaven that we have something better than our brains

to depend upon.' As literature becomes more of a regular profession,

your noble wishes to show his independence of anything like a commercial

pursuit. Walpole can speak politely to men like Gibbon, and even to

Hume, who have some claim to be gentlemen as well as authors; but he

feels that he is condescending even to them, and has nothing but

contemptuous aversion for a Johnson, whose claim to consideration

certainly did not include any special refinement. Johnson and his circle

had still an odour of Grub street, which is only to be kept at a

distance more carefully because it is in a position of comparative

independence. Meanwhile, the author himself holds by the authority of

Addison and Pope. They, he still admits for the most part, represent the

orthodox church; their work is still taken to be the perfection of art,

and the canons which they have handed down have a prestige which makes

any dissenter an object of suspicion. Yet as the audience has really

changed, a certain change also makes itself felt in the substance and

the form of the corresponding literature.

One remarkable book marks the opening of the period. The first part of

Young's _Night Thoughts_ appeared in 1742, and the poem at once acquired

a popularity which lasted at least through the century. Young had been

more or less associated with the Addison and Pope circles, in the later

part of Queen Anne's reign. He had failed to obtain any satisfactory

share of the patronage which came to some of his fellows. He is still a

Wit till he has to take orders for a college living as the old Wits'

circle is decaying. He tried with little success to get something by

attaching himself to some questionable patrons who were induced to carry

on the practice, and the want of due recognition left him to the end of

his life as a man with a grievance. He had tried poetical epistles, and

satires, and tragedies with undeniable success and had shown undeniable

ability. Yet somehow or other he had not, one may say, emerged from the

second class till in the _Night Thoughts_ he opened a new vein which

exactly met the contemporary taste. The success was no doubt due to some

really brilliant qualities, but I need not here ask in what precise rank

he should be placed, as an author or a moralist. His significance for us

is simple. The _Night Thoughts_, as he tells us, was intended to supply

an omission in Pope's _Essay on Man_. Pope's deistical position excluded

any reference to revealed religion, to posthumous rewards and penalties,

and expressed an optimistic philosophy which ignored the corruption of

human nature. Young represents a partial revolt against the domination

of the Pope circle. He had always been an outsider, and his life at

Oxford had, you may perhaps hope, preserved his orthodoxy. He writes

blank verse, though evidently the blank verse of a man accustomed to the

'heroic couplets'; he uses the conventional 'poetic diction'; he strains

after epigrammatic point in the manner of Pope, and the greater part of

his poem is an elaborate argumentation to prove the immortality of

man--chiefly by the argument from astronomy. But though so far accepting

the old method, his success in introducing a new element marks an

important change. He is elaborately and deliberately pathetic; he is

always thinking of death, and calling upon the readers to sympathise

with his sorrows and accept his consolations. The world taken by itself

is, he maintains, a huge lunatic asylum, and the most hideous of sights

is a naked human heart. We are, indeed, to find sufficient consolation

from the belief in immortality. How far Young was orthodox or logical or

really edifying is a question with which I am not concerned. The

appetite for this strain of melancholy reflection is characteristic.

Blair's _Grave_, representing another version of the sentiment, appeared

simultaneously and independently. Blair, like Thomson, living in

Scotland, was outside the Pope circle of wit, and had studied the old

English authors instead of Pope and Dryden. He negotiated for the

publication of his poem through Watts and Doddridge, each of whom was an

eminent interpreter of the religious sentiment of the middle classes.

Both wrote hymns still popular, and Doddridge's _Rise and Progress of

Religion in the Soul_ has been a permanently valued manual. The Pope

school had omitted religious considerations, and treated religion as a

system of abstract philosophy. The new class of readers wants something

more congenial to the teaching of their favourite ministers and

chapels. Young and Blair thoroughly suited them. Wesley admired Young's

poem, and even proposed to bring out an edition. In his _Further Appeal

to Men of Reason and Religion_, Wesley, like Brown and Hartley, draws up

a striking indictment of the manners of the time. He denounces the

liberty and effeminacy of the nobility; the widespread immorality; the

chicanery of lawyers; the jobbery of charities; the stupid

self-satisfaction of Englishmen; the brutality of the Army; the

indolence and preferment humbug of the Church--the true cause, as he

says, of the 'contempt for the clergy' which had become proverbial. His

remedy of course is to be found in a revival of true religion. He

accepts the general sentiment that the times are out of joint, though he

would seek for a deeper cause than that which was recognised by the

political satirist. While Young was weeping at Welwyn, James Hervey was

meditating among the tombs in Devonshire, and soon afterwards gave

utterance to the result in language inspired by very bad taste, but

showing a love of nature and expressing the 'sentimentalism' which was

then a new discovery. It is said to have eclipsed Law's _Serious Call_,

which I have already mentioned as giving, in admirable literary form,

the view of the contemporary world which naturally found favour with

religious thinkers.

These symptoms indicate the tendencies of the rising class to which the

author has mainly to address himself. It has ceased to be fully

represented by the upper social stratum whose tastes are reflected by

Pope. No distinct democratic sentiment had yet appeared; the

aristocratic order was accepted as inevitable or natural; but there was

a vague though growing sentiment that the rulers are selfish and

corrupt. There is no strong sceptical or anti-religious sentiment; but a

spreading conviction that the official pastors are scandalously careless

in supplying the wants of their flocks. The philosophical and literary

canons of the scholar and gentleman have become unsatisfactory; the

vulgar do not care for the delicate finish appreciated by your

Chesterfield and acquired in the conversations of polite society, and

the indolent scepticism which leads to metaphysical expositions, and is

not allied with any political or social passion, does not appeal to

them. The popular books of the preceding generation had been the

directly religious books: Baxter's _Saint's Rest_, and the _Pilgrim's

Progress_--despised by the polite but beloved by the popular class in

spite of the critics; and among the dissenters such a work as Boston's

_Fourfold State_, or in the Church, Law's _Serious Call_. Your polite

author had ignored the devil, and he plays a part in human affairs

which, as Carlyle pointed out in later days, cannot be permanently

overlooked. The old horned and hoofed devil, indeed, for whom Defoe had

still a weakness, shown in his _History of the Devil_, was becoming a

little incredible; witchcraft was dying out, though Wesley still felt

bound to profess some belief in it; and the old Calvinistic dogmatism,

though it could produce a certain amount of controversy among the

Methodists, had been made obsolete by the growth of rationalism. Still

the new public wanted something more savoury than its elegant teachers

had given; and, if sermons had ceased to be so stimulating as of old, it

could find it in secular moralisers. Defoe, always keenly alive to the

general taste, had tried to supply the demand not only by his queer

_History of the Devil_ but by appending a set of moral reflections to

_Robinson Crusoe_ and other edifying works, which disgusted Charles Lamb

by their petty tradesman morality, and which hardly represent a very

lofty ideal. But the recognised representative of the moralists was the

ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the _Rambler_ to

recognise the massive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the

ponderous verbiage and elephantine facetiousness; yet it was not only a

treasure of wisdom to the learned ladies, Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs.

Elizabeth Carter and the like, who were now beginning to appear, but was

received, without provoking ridicule, by the whole literary class.

_Rasselas_, in spite of its formality, is still a very impressive book.

The literary critic may amuse himself with the question how Johnson came

to acquire the peculiar style which imposed upon contemporaries and

excited the ridicule of the next generation. According to Boswell, it

was due to his reading of Sir Thomas Browne, and a kind of reversion to

the earlier period in which the Latinisms of Browne were still natural,

when the revolt to simple prose had not begun. Addison, at any rate, as

Boswell truly remarks, writes like a 'companion,' and Johnson like a

teacher. He puts on his academical robes to deliver his message to

mankind, and is no longer the Wit, echoing the coffee-house talk, but

the moralist, who looks indeed at actual life, but stands well apart

and knows many hours of melancholy and hypochondria. He preaches the

morality of his time--the morality of Richardson and Young--only

tempered by a hearty contempt for cant, sentimentalism, and all

unreality, and expressing his deeper and stronger nature. The style,

however acquired, has the idiosyncrasy of the man himself; but I shall

have to speak of the Johnsonian view in the next period, when he became

the acknowledged literary dictator and expressed one main tendency of

the period.

Meanwhile Richardson, as Johnson put it, had been teaching the passions

to move at the command of virtue. In other words, Richardson had

discovered an incomparably more effective way of preaching a popular

sermon. He had begun, as we know, by writing a series of edifying

letters to young women; and expounded the same method in _Pamela_, and

afterwards in the famous _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_.

All his books are deliberate attempts to embody his ideal in model

representatives of the society of his day. He might have taken a

suggestion from Bunyan; who besides his great religious allegory and the

curious life of _Mr. Badman_, couched a moral lesson in a description

of the actual tradesman of his time. Allegory was now to be supplanted

by fiction. The man was to take the place of the personified virtue and

vice. Defoe had already shown the power of downright realistic

storytelling; and Richardson perhaps learnt something from him when he

was drawing his minute and vivid portraits of the people who might at

any rate pass for being realities. I must take for granted that

Richardson was a man of genius, without adding a word as to its precise

quality. I need only repeat one familiar remark. Richardson was a

typical tradesman of the period; he was the industrious apprentice who

marries his master's daughter; he lived between Hammersmith and

Salisbury Court as a thorough middle-class cockney, and had not an idea

beyond those common to his class; he accepted the ordinary creeds and

conventions; he looked upon freethinkers with such horror that he will

not allow even his worst villains to be religious sceptics; he shares

the profound reverence of the shopkeepers for the upper classes who are

his customers, and he rewards virtue with a coach and six. And yet this

mild little man, with the very narrowest intellectual limitations,

writes a book which makes a mark not only in England but in Europe, and

is imitated by Rousseau in the book which set more than one generation

weeping; _Clarissa Harlowe_, moreover, was accepted as the masterpiece

of its kind, and she moved not only Englishmen but Germans and Frenchmen

to sympathetic tears. One explanation is that Richardson is regarded as

the inventor of 'sentimentalism.' The word, as one of his correspondents

tells him, was a novelty about 1749, and was then supposed to include

anything that was clever and agreeable. I do not myself believe that

anybody invented the mode of feeling; but it is true that Richardson was

the first writer who definitely turned it to account for a new literary

genus. Sentimentalism, I suppose, means, roughly speaking, indulgence in

emotion for its own sake. The sentimentalist does not weep because

painful thoughts are forced upon him but because he finds weeping

pleasant in itself. He appreciates the 'luxury of grief.' (The phrase is

used in Brown's _Barbarossa_; I don't know who invented it.) Certainly

the discovery was not new. The charms of melancholy had been recognised

by Jaques in the forest of Arden and sung by various later poets; but

sentimentalism at the earlier period naturally took the form of

religious meditation upon death and judgment. Young and Hervey are

religious sentimentalists, who have also an eye to literary elegance.

Wesley was far too masculine and sensible to be a sentimentalist; his

emotions impel him to vigorous action; and are much too serious to be

cultivated for their own sakes or to be treated aesthetically. But the

general sense that something is not in order in the general state of

things, without as yet any definite aim for the vague discontent, was

shared by the true sentimentalist. Richardson's sentimentalism is partly

unconscious. He is a moralist very much in earnest, preaching a very

practical and not very exalted morality. It is his moral purpose, his

insistence upon the edifying point of view, his singular fertility in

finding illustrations for his doctrines, which makes him a

sentimentalist. I will confess that the last time I read _Clarissa

Harlowe_ it affected me with a kind of disgust. We wonder sometimes at

the coarse nerves of our ancestors, who could see on the stage any

quantity of murders and ghosts and miscellaneous horrors. Richardson

gave me the same shock from the elaborate detail in which he tells the

story of Clarissa; rubbing our noses, if I may say so, in all her

agony, and squeezing the last drop of bitterness out of every incident.

I should have liked some symptom that he was anxious to turn his eyes

from the tragedy instead of giving it so minutely as to suggest that he

enjoys the spectacle. Books sometimes owe part of their success, as I

fear we must admit, to the very fact that they are in bad taste. They

attract the contemporary audience by exaggerating and over-weighting the

new vein of sentiment which they have discovered. That, in fact, seems

to be the reason why in spite of all authority, modern readers find it

difficult to read Richardson through. We know, at any rate, how it

affected one great contemporary. This incessant strain upon the moral in

question (a very questionable moral it is) struck Fielding as mawkish

and unmanly. Richardson seemed to be a narrow, straitlaced preacher, who

could look at human nature only from the conventional point of view, and

thought that because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes and

ale.

Fielding's revolt produced his great novels, and the definite creation

of an entirely new form of art which was destined to a long and

vigorous life. He claimed to be the founder of a new province in

literature, and saw with perfect clearness what was to be its nature.

The old romances which had charmed the seventeenth century were still

read occasionally: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, and Dr.

Johnson had enjoyed them, and Chesterfield, at a later period, has to

point out to his son that Calprenède's _Cassandra_ has become

ridiculous. The short story, of which Mrs. Behn was the last English

writer, was more or less replaced by the little sketches in the

_Spectator_; and Defoe had shown the attractiveness of a downright

realistic narrative of a series of adventures. But whatever precedents

may be found, our unfortunate ancestors had not yet the true modern

novel. Fielding had, like other hack authors, written for the stage and

tried to carry on the Congreve tradition. But the stage had declined.

The best products, perhaps, were the _Beggar's Opera_ and

_Chrononhotonthologos_ and Fielding's own _Tom Thumb_. When Fielding

tried to make use of the taste for political lampoons, the result was

the Act of Parliament which in 1737 introduced the licensing system. The

Shakespearian drama, it is true, was coming into popularity with the

help of Fielding's great friend, Garrick; but no new Shakespeare

appeared to write modern _Hamlets_ and _Othellos_; Johnson tried to

supply his place with the ponderous _Irene_, and John Home followed with

_Douglas_ of 'My name is Norval' fame. The tragedies were becoming more

dreary. Characteristic of Fielding was his admiration of Lillo, whose

_George Barnwell_ (1730) and _Fatal Curiosity_ (about 1736), the last of

them brought out under Fielding's own management, were remarkable

attempts to revive tragedies by going to real life. It is plain,

however, that the theatre is no longer the appropriate organ of the

reading classes. The licensing act seems to have expressed the general

feeling which, if we call it Puritan, must be Puritan in a sense which

described the general middle-class prejudices. The problem which

Fielding had to solve was to find a literary form which should meet the

tastes of the new public, who could not be drawn to the theatre, and

which yet should have some of the characteristics which had hitherto

been confined to the dramatic form. That was the problem which was

triumphantly solved by _Tom Jones_. The story is no longer a mere series

of adventures, such as that which happened to Crusoe or Gil Blas,

connected by the fact that they happen to the same person; nor a

prolonged religious or moral tract, showing how evil will be punished

and virtue rewarded. It implies a dramatic situation which can be

developed without being hampered by the necessities of

stage-representation; and which can give full scope to a realistic

portrait of nature as it is under all the familiar circumstances of time

and place. This novel, which fulfilled those conditions, has ever since

continued to flourish; although a long time was to elapse before any one

could approach the merits of the first inventor. In all ages, I suppose,

the great artist, whether dramatist or epic poet or novelist, has more

or less consciously had the aim which Fielding implicitly claims for

himself; that is, to portray human nature. Every great artist, again,

must, in one sense, be thoroughly 'realistic.' The word has acquired an

irrelevant connotation: but I mean that his vision of the world must

correspond to the genuine living convictions of his time. He only ceases

to be a realist in that wide sense of the word when he deliberately

affects beliefs which have lost their vitality and uses the old

mythology, for example, as convenient machinery, when it has ceased to

have any real hold upon the minds of their contemporaries. So far Defoe

and Richardson and Fielding were perfectly right and deservedly

successful because they described the actual human beings whom they saw

before them, instead of regarding a setting forth of plain facts as

something below the dignity of the artist. Every new departure in

literature thrives in proportion as it abandons the old conventions

which have become mere survivals. Each of them, in his way, felt the

need of appealing to the new class of readers by direct portraiture of

the readers themselves, Fielding's merit is his thorough appreciation of

this necessity. He will give you men as he sees them, with perfect

impartiality and photographic accuracy. His hearty appreciation of

genuine work is characteristic. He admires Lillo, as I have said, for

giving George Barnwell instead of the conventional stage hero; and his

friend Hogarth, who was in pictorial art what he was in fiction, and

paints the 'Rake's Progress' without bothering about old masters or the

grand style; and he is enthusiastic about Garrick because he makes

Hamlet's fear of the ghost so natural that Partridge takes it for a

mere matter of course. Downright, forcible appeals to fact--contempt for

the artificial and conventional--are his strength, though they also

imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the 'good

buffalo,' as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of

roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the

fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. That

corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may

help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet

corresponded to a vague feeling after a real element of interest. But,

in truth, our criticism, I think, applies as much to Richardson as to

Fielding. Realism, taken in what I should call the right sense, is not

properly opposed to 'idealism'; it points to one of the two poles

towards which all literary art should be directed. The artist is a

realist so far as he deals with the actual life and the genuine beliefs

of his time; but he is an idealist so far as he sees the most essential

facts and utters the deepest and most permanent truths in his own

dialect. His work should be true to life and give the essence of actual

human nature, and also express emotions and thoughts common to the men

of all times. Now that is the weak side of the fiction of this period.

We may read _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_ with unstinted

admiration; but we feel that we are in a confined atmosphere. There are

regions of thought and feeling which seem to lie altogether beyond their

province. Fielding, in his way, was a bit of a philosopher, though he is

too much convinced that Locke and Hoadley have said the last words in

theology and philosophy. Parson Adams is a most charming person in his

way, but his intellectual outlook is decidedly limited. That may not

trouble us much; but we have also the general feeling that we are living

in a little provincial society which somehow takes its own special

arrangements to be part of the eternal order of nature. The worthy

Richardson is aware that there are a great many rakes and infamous

persons about; but it never occurs to him that there can be any

speculation outside the Thirty-nine Articles; and though Fielding

perceives a great many abuses in the actual administration of the laws

and the political system, he regards the social order, with its squires

and parsons and attorneys as the only conceivable state of things. In

other words they, and I might add their successor Smollett, represent

all the prejudices and narrow assumptions of the quiet, respectable, and

in many ways worthy and domestically excellent, middle-class of the day;

which, on the whole, is determined not to look too deeply into awkward

questions, but to go along sturdily working out its own conceptions and

plodding along on well-established lines.

Another literary movement is beginning which is to lead to the sense of

this deficiency. The nobleman, growing rich and less absorbed in the

political world, has time and leisure to cultivate his tastes, becomes,

as I have said, a dilettante, and sends his son to make the grand tour

as a regular part of his education. Some demon whispers to him, as Pope

puts it, Visto, have a taste! He buys books and pictures, takes to

architecture and landscape-gardening, and becomes a 'collector.' The

instinct of 'collecting' is, I suppose, natural, and its development is

connected with some curious results. One of the favourite objects of

ridicule of the past essayists was the virtuoso. There was something to

them inexpressibly absurd in a passion for buying odds and ends. Pope,

Arbuthnot, and Gay made a special butt of Dr. Woodward, possessor of a

famous ancient shield and other antiquities. Equally absurd, they

thought, was his passion for fossils. He made one of the first

collections of such objects, saw that they really had a scientific

interest, and founded at Cambridge the first professorship of geology.

Another remarkable collector was Sir Hans Sloane, who had brought home a

great number of plants from Jamaica and founded the botanic garden at

Chelsea. His servant, James Salter, set up the famous Don Saltero's

museum in the same place, containing, as Steele tell us, '10,000

gimcracks, including a "petrified crab" from China and Pontius Pilate's

wife's chambermaid's sister's hat.' Don Saltero and his master seemed

equally ridiculous; and Young in his satires calls Sloane 'the foremost

toyman of his time,' and describes him as adoring a pin of Queen

Elizabeth's. Sloane's collections were bought for the nation and became

the foundation of the British Museum; when (1753) Horace Walpole remarks

that they might be worth £80,000 for anybody who loved hippopotamuses,

sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese. Scientific research,

that is, revealed itself to contemporaries as a childish and absurd

monomania, unworthy of a man of sense. John Hunter had not yet begun to

form the unequalled museum of physiology, and even the scientific

collectors could have but a dim perception of the importance of a minute

observation of natural phenomena. The contempt for such collections

naturally accompanied a contempt for the antiquary, another variety of

the same species. The study of old documents and ancient buildings

seemed to be a simple eccentricity. Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary,

was a typical case. He devoted himself to the study of old records and

published a series of English Chronicles which were of essential service

to English historians. To his contemporaries this study seemed to be as

worthless as Woodward's study of fossils. Like other monomaniacs he

became crusty and sour for want of sympathy. His like-minded

contemporary, Carte, ruined the prospects of his history by letting out

his belief in the royal power of curing by touch. Antiquarianism, though

providing invaluable material for history, seemed to be a silly

crotchet, and to imply a hatred to sound Whiggism and modern

enlightenment, so long as the Wit and the intelligent person of quality

looked upon the past simply as the period of Gothic barbarism. But an

approximation is beginning to take place. The relation is indicated by

the case of Horace Walpole, a man whose great abilities have been

concealed by his obvious affectations. Two of Walpole's schoolfellows at

Eton were Gray and William Cole. Cole, the Cambridge antiquary, who

tried to do for his own university what Woodward had done for Oxford,

was all but a Catholic, and in political sympathies agreed with Hearne

and Carte. Walpole was a thorough Whig and a freethinker, so long, at

least, as freethinking did not threaten danger to comfortable sinecures

bestowed upon the sons of Whig ministers. But Cole became Walpole's

antiquarian oracle. When Walpole came back from the grand tour, with

nothing particular to do except spend his income, he found one amusement

in dabbling in antiquarian research. He discovered, among other things,

that even a Gothic cathedral could be picturesque, and in 1750 set about

building a 'little Gothic Castle' at Strawberry Hill. The Gothic was of

course the most superficial imitation; but it became the first of a long

line of similar imitations growing gradually more elaborate with results

of which we all have our own opinion. To Walpole himself Strawberry Hill

was a mere plaything, and he would not have wished to be taken too

seriously; as his romance of the _Castle of Otranto_ was a literary

squib at which he laughed himself, though it became the forefather of a

great literary school. The process may be regarded as logical: the

previous generation, rejoicing in its own enlightenment, began to

recognise the difference between present and past more clearly than its

ancestors had done; but generally inferred that the men of old had been

barbarians. The Tory and Jacobite who clings to the past praises its

remains with blind affection, and can see nothing in the present but

corruption and destruction of the foundations of society. The

indifferent dilettante, caring little for any principles and mainly

desirous of amusement, discovers a certain charm in the old institutions

while he professes to despise them in theory. That means one of the

elements of the complex sentiment which we describe as romanticism. The

past is obsolete, but it is pretty enough to be used in making new

playthings. The reconciliation will be reached when the growth of

historical inquiry leads men to feel that past and present are parts of

a continuous series, and to look upon their ancestors neither as simply

ridiculous nor as objects of blind admiration. The historical sense was,

in fact, growing: and Walpole's other friend, Gray, may represent the

literary version. The Queen Anne school, though it despised the older

literature, had still a certain sneaking regard for it. Addison, for

example, pays some grudging compliments to Chaucer and Spenser, though

he is careful to point out the barbarism of their taste. Pope, like all

poets, had loved Spenser in his boyhood and was well read in English

poetry. It was mighty simple of Rowe, he said, to try to write in the

style of Shakespeare, that is, in the style of a bad age. Yet he became

one of the earliest, and far from one of the worst, editors of

Shakespeare; and the growth of literary interest in Shakespeare is one

of the characteristic symptoms of the period. Pope had contemplated a

history of English poetry which was taken up by Gray and finally

executed by Warton. The development of an interest in literary history

naturally led to new departures. The poets of the period, Gray and

Collins and the Wartons, are no longer members of the little circle with

strict codes of taste. They are scholars and students not shut up within

the metropolitan area. There has been a controversy as to whether Gray's

unproductiveness is partly to be ascribed to his confinement to a narrow

and, it seems, to a specially stupid academical circle at Cambridge.

Anyway, living apart from the world of politicians and fine gentlemen,

he had the opportunity to become the most learned of English poets and

to be at home in a wide range of literature representing a great variety

of models. As the antiquary begins to rise to the historian, the

poetical merits recognised in the less regular canons become manifest.

Thomson, trying to write a half-serious imitation of Spenser, made his

greatest success by a kind of accident in the _Castle of Indolence_

(1748); Thomas Warton's Observation on the _Faery Queene_ in 1757 was an

illustration of the influence of historical criticism. I need not say

how Collins was interested by Highland superstition and Gray impressed

by Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_, and how in other directions the

labours of the antiquarian were beginning to provide materials for the

poetical imagination. Gray and Collins still held to the main Pope

principles. They try to be clear and simple and polished, and their

trick of personifying abstract qualities indicates the philosophical

doctrine which was still acceptable. The special principle, however,

which they were beginning to recognise is that indicated by Joseph

Warton's declaration in his _Essay on Pope_ (1757). 'The fashion of

moralising in verse,' he said, had been pushed too far, and he proceeded

to startle the orthodox by placing Spenser above Pope. The heresy gave

so much offence, it is said, that he did not venture to bring out his

second volume for twenty-five years. The point made by Warton marks, in

fact, the critical change. The weak side of the Pope school had been the

subordination of the imagination to the logical theory. Poetry tends to

become rhymed prose because the poet like the preacher has to expound

doctrines and to prove by argument. He despises the old mythology and

the romantic symbolism because the theory was obviously absurd to a man

of the world, and to common sense. He believes that Homer was

deliberately conveying an allegory: and an allegory, whether of Homer or

of Spenser, is a roundabout and foolish way of expressing the truth. A

philosopher--and a poem is versified philosophy--should express himself

as simply and directly as possible. But, as soon as you begin to

appreciate the charm of ancient poetry, to be impressed by Scandinavian

Sagas or Highland superstition or Welsh bards, or allow yourself to

enjoy Spenser's idealised knights and ladies in spite of their total

want of common sense, or to appreciate _Paradise Lost_ although you no

longer accept Milton's scheme of theology, it becomes plain that the

specially poetic charm must consist in something else; that it can

appeal to the emotions and the imagination, though the doctrine which it

embodies is as far as possible from convincing your reason. The

discovery has a bearing upon what is called the love of Nature. Even

Thomson and his followers still take the didactic view of Nature. They

are half ashamed of their interest in mere dead objects, but can treat

skies and mountains as a text for discourses upon Natural Theology. But

Collins and Gray and Warton are beginning to perceive that the pleasure

which we receive from a beautiful prospect, whether of a mountain or of

an old abbey, is something which justifies itself and may be expressed

in poetry without tagging a special moral to its tail. Yet the sturdy

common sense represented by Fielding and Johnson is slow to accept this

view, and the romantic view of things has still for him a touch of

sentimentalism and affectation, and indicates the dilettante rather than

the serious thinker, and Pope still represents the orthodox creed though

symptoms of revolt are slowly showing themselves.

V

(1763-1788)

I now come to the generation which preceded the outbreak of the French

Revolution. Social and political movements are beginning to show

themselves in something of their modern form, and suggest most

interesting problems for the speculative historian. At the same time, if

we confine ourselves to the purely literary region, it is on the whole a

period of stagnation. Johnson is the acknowledged dictator, and Johnson,

the 'last of the Tories,' upholds the artistic canons of Dryden and

Pope, though no successor arises to produce new works at all comparable

with theirs. The school, still ostensibly dominant, has lost its power

of stimulating genius; and as yet no new school has arisen to take its

place. Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott were still at college, and

Byron in the nursery, at the end of the period. There is a kind of

literary interregnum, though not a corresponding stagnation of

speculative and political energy.

Looking, in the first place, at the active world, the great fact of the

time is the series of changes to which we give the name of the

industrial revolution. The growth of commercial and manufacturing

enterprise which had been going on quietly and continuously had been

suddenly accelerated. Glasgow and Liverpool and Manchester and

Birmingham were becoming great towns, and the factory system was being

developed, profoundly modifying the old relation of the industrial

classes. England was beginning to aim at commercial supremacy, and

politics were to be more than ever dominated by the interests of the

'moneyed man,' or, as we now call them, 'capitalists.' Essentially

connected with these changes is another characteristic development.

Social problems were arising. The growth of the manufactory system and

the accumulation of masses of town population, for example, forced

attention to the problem of pauperism, and many attempts of various

kinds were being made to deal with it. The same circumstances were

beginning to rouse an interest in education; it had suddenly struck

people that on Sundays, at least, children might be taught their

letters so far as to enable them to spell out their Bible. The

inadequacy of the police and prison systems to meet the new requirements

roused the zeal of many, and led to some reforms. As the British Empire

extended we began to become sensible of certain correlative duties; the

impeachment of Warren Hastings showed that we had scruples about

treating India simply as a place where 'nabobs' are to accumulate

fortunes; and the slave-trade suggested questions of conscience which at

the end of the period were to prelude an agitation in some ways

unprecedented.

In the political world again we have the first appearance of a

distinctly democratic movement. The struggle over Wilkes during the

earlier years began a contest which was to last through generations. The

American War of Independence emphasised party issues, and in some sense

heralded the French Revolution. I only note one point. The British

'Whig' of those days represented two impulses which gradually diverged.

There was the home-bred Whiggism of Wilkes and Horne Tooke--the Whiggism

of which the stronghold was in the city of London, with such heroes as

Lord Mayor Beckford, whose statue in the Guildhall displays him hurling

defiance at poor George III. This party embodies the dissatisfaction of

the man of business with the old system which cramped his energies. In

the name of liberty he demands 'self-government'; not greater vigour in

the Executive but less interference and a freer hand for the capitalist.

He believes in individual enterprise. He accepts the good old English

principle that the man who pays taxes should have a voice in spending

them; but he appeals not to an abstract political principle but to

tradition. The reformer, as so often happens, calls himself a restorer;

his political bible begins with the great charter and comes down to the

settlement of 1688. Meanwhile the true revolutionary

movement--represented by Paine and Godwin, appeals to the doctrines of

natural equality and the rights of man. It is unequivocally democratic,

and implies a growing cleavage between the working man and the

capitalists. It repudiates all tradition, and aspires to recast the

whole social order. Instead of proposing simply to diminish the

influence of government, it really tends to centralisation and the

transference of power to the lower classes. This genuine revolutionary

principle did not become conspicuous in England until it was introduced

by the contagion from France, and even then it remained an exotic. For

the present the Whig included all who opposed the Toryism of George III.

The difference between the Whig and the Radical was still latent, though

to be manifested in the near future. When the 'new Whigs,' as Burke

called them, Fox and Sheridan, welcomed the French Revolution in 1789,

they saw in it a constitutional movement of the English type and not a

thorough-going democratic movement which would level all classes, and

transfer the political supremacy to a different social stratum.

This implies a dominant characteristic of the English political

movement. It was led, to use a later phrase, by Whigs not Radicals; by

men who fully accepted the British constitution, and proposed to remove

abuses, not to recast the whole system. The Whig wished to carry out

more thoroughly the platform accepted in 1688, to replace decaying by

sound timbers; but not to reconstruct from the base or to override

tradition by abstract and obsolete theories. His desire for change was

limited by a strong though implicit conservatism. This characteristic

is reflected in the sphere of speculative activity. Philosophy was

represented by the Scottish school whose watchword was common sense.

Reid opposed the scepticism of Hume which would lead, as he held, to

knocking his head against a post--a course clearly condemned by common

sense; but instead of soaring into transcendental and ontological

regions, he stuck to 'Baconian induction' and a psychology founded upon

experience. Hume himself, as I have said, had written for the

speculative few not for the vulgar; and he had now turned from the chase

of metaphysical refinements to historical inquiry. Interest in history

had become characteristic of the time. The growth of a stable, complex,

and continuous social order implies the formation of a corporate memory.

Masses of records had already been accumulated by antiquaries who had

constructed rather annals than history, in which the series of events

was given without much effort to arrange them in literary form or trace

the causal connection. In France, however, Montesquieu had definitely

established the importance of applying the historical method to

political problems; and Voltaire had published some of his brilliant

surveys which attempt to deal with the social characteristics as well

as the mere records of battles and conquests. Hume's _History_,

admirably written, gave Englishmen the first opportunity of enjoying a

lucid survey of the conspicuous facts previously embedded in ponderous

antiquarian phrases. Hume was one of the triumvirate who produced the

recognised masterpieces of contemporary literature. Robertson's theories

are, I take it, superseded: but his books, especially the _Charles V._,

not only gave broad surveys but suggested generalisations as to the

development of institutions, which, like most generalisations, were

mainly wrong, but stimulated further inquiry. Gibbon, the third of the

triumvirate, uniting the power of presenting great panoramas of history

with thorough scholarship and laborious research, produced the great

work which has not been, if it ever can be, superseded. A growing

interest in history thus led to some of the chief writings of the time,

as we can see that it was the natural outgrowth of the intellectual

position. The rapid widening of the historical horizon made even a bare

survey useful, and led to some recognition of the importance of guiding

and correcting political and social theory by careful investigation of

past experience. The historian began to feel an ambition to deal in

philosophical theories. He was, moreover, touched by the great

scientific movement. A complete survey of the intellectual history of

the time would of course have to deal with the great men who were laying

the foundations of the modern physical sciences; such as Black, and

Priestley, and Cavendish, and Hunter. It would indeed, have to point out

how small was the total amount of such knowledge in comparison with the

vast superstructure which has been erected in the last century. The

foundation of the Royal Institution at the end of the eighteenth century

marks, perhaps, the point at which the importance of physical science

began to impress the popular imagination. But great thinkers had long

recognised the necessity of applying scientific method in the sphere of

social and political investigation. Two men especially illustrate the

tendency and the particular turn which it took in England. Adam Smith's

great book in 1776 applied scientific method to political economy. Smith

is distinguished from his French predecessors by the historical element

of his work; by his careful study, that is, of economic history, and his

consequent presentation of his theory not as a body of absolute and

quasi-mathematical truth, but as resting upon the experience and

applicable to the concrete facts of his time. His limitation is equally

characteristic. He investigated the play of the industrial mechanism

with too little reference to the thorough interdependence of economic

and other social conditions. Showing how that mechanism adapts itself to

supply and demand, he comes to hold that the one thing necessary is to

leave free play to competition, and that the one essential force is the

individual's desire for his own material interests. He became,

therefore, the prophet of letting things alone. That doctrine--whatever

its merits or defects--implies acquiescence in the existing order, and

is radically opposed to a demand for a reconstruction of society. This

is most clearly illustrated by the other thinker Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham, unlike Smith, shared the contempt for history of the absolute

theorists, and was laying down a theory conceived in the spirit of

absolutism which became the creed of the uncompromising political

radicals of the next generation. But it is characteristic that Bentham

was not, during the eighteenth century, a Radical at all. He altogether

repudiated and vigorously denounced the 'Rights of Men' doctrines of

Rousseau and his followers, and regarded the Declaration of

Independence in which they were embodied as a mere hotchpotch of

absurdity. He is determined to be thoroughly empirical--to take men as

he found them. But his utilitarianism supposed that men's views of

happiness and utility were uniform and clear, and that all that was

wanted was to show them the means by which their ends could be reached.

Then, he thought, rulers and subjects would be equally ready to apply

his principles. He fully accepted Adam Smith's theory of

non-interference in economical matters; and his view of philosophy in

the lump was that there was no such thing, only a heap of obsolete

fallacies and superstitions which would be easily dispersed by the

application of a little downright common sense. Bentham's

utilitarianism, again, is congenial to the whole intellectual movement.

His ethical theory was substantially identical with that of Paley--the

most conspicuous writer upon theology of the generation,--and Paley is

as thoroughly empirical in his theology as in his ethics, and makes the

truth of religion essentially a question of historical and scientific

evidence.

It follows that neither in practice nor in speculative questions were

the English thinkers of the time prescient of any coming revolution.

They denounced abuses, but they had regarded abuses as removable

excrescences on a satisfactory system. They were content to appeal to

common sense, and to leave philosophers to wrangle over ultimate

results. They might be, and in fact were, stirring questions which would

lead to far more vital disputes; but for the present they were

unconscious of the future, and content to keep the old machinery going

though desiring to improve its efficiency. The characteristic might be

elucidated by comparison with the other great European literatures. In

France, Voltaire had begun about 1762 his crusade against orthodoxy, or,

as he calls it, his attempt to crush the infamous. He was supported by

his allies, the Encyclopædists. While Helvétius and Holbach were

expounding materialism and atheism, Rousseau had enunciated the

political doctrines which were to be applied to the Revolution, and

elsewhere had uttered that sentimental deism which was to be so dear to

many of his readers. Our neighbours, in short, after their

characteristic fashion, were pushing logic to its consequences, and

fully awake to the approach of an impending catastrophe. In Germany the

movement took the philosophical and literary shape. Lessing's critical

writings had heralded the change. Goethe, after giving utterance to

passing phases of thought, was rising to become the embodiment of a new

ideal of intellectual culture. Schiller passed through the storm and

stress period and developed into the greatest national dramatist. Kant

had awakened from his dogmatic theory, and the publication of the

_Critique of Pure Reason_ in 1781 had awakened the philosophical world

of Germany. In both countries the study of earlier English literature,

of the English deists and freethinkers, of Shakespeare and of

Richardson, had had great influence, and had been the occasion of new

developments. But it seemed as though England had ceased to be the

originator of ideas, and was for the immediate future at least to

receive political and philosophical impulses from France and Germany. To

explain the course taken in the different societies, to ask how far it

might be due to difference of characteristics, and of political

constitutions, of social organism and individual genius, would be a very

pretty but rather large problem. I refer to it simply to illustrate the

facts, to emphasise the quiet, orderly, if you will, sleepy movement of

English thought which, though combined with great practical energy and

vigorous investigation of the neighbouring departments of inquiry,

admitted of comparative indifference to the deeper issues involved. It

did not generate that stimulus to literary activity due to the dawning

of new ideas and the opening of wide vistas of speculation. When the

French Revolution broke out, it took Englishmen, one may say, by

surprise, and except by a few keen observers or rare disciples of

Rousseau, was as unexpected as the earthquake of Lisbon.

Let us glance, now, at the class which was to carry on the literary

tradition. It is known to us best through Boswell, and its

characteristics are represented by Johnson's favourite club. In one of

his talks with Boswell the great man amused himself by showing how the

club might form itself into a university. Every branch of knowledge and

thought might, he thought, be represented, though it must be admitted

that some of the professors suggested were scarcely up to the mark. The

social variety is equally remarkable. Among the thirty or forty members

elected before Johnson's death, there were the lights of literature;

Johnson himself and Goldsmith, Adam Smith and Gibbon, and others of

less fame. The aristocratic element was represented by Beauclerk and by

half a dozen peers, such as the amiable Lord Charlemont; Burke, Fox,

Sheridan, and Wyndham represent political as well as literary eminence;

three or four bishops represent Church authority; legal luminaries

included Dunning, William Scott (the famous Lord Stowell), Sir Robert

Chambers, and the amazingly versatile Sir William Jones. Boswell and

Langton are also cultivated country gentlemen; Sir Joseph Banks stood

for science, and three other names show the growing respect for art. The

amiable Dr. Burney was a musician who had raised the standard of his

calling; Garrick had still more conspicuously gained social respect for

the profession of actor; and Sir Joshua Reynolds was the representative

of the English school of painters, whose works still impress upon us the

beauty of our great-grandmothers and the charm of their children, and

suggest the existence of a really dignified and pure domestic life in a

class too often remembered by the reckless gambling and loose morality

of the gilded youth of the day. To complete the picture of the world in

which Johnson was at home we should have to add from the outer sphere

such types as Thrale, the prosperous brewer, and the lively Mrs. Thrale

and Mrs. Montague, who kept a salon and was president of the 'Blues.'

The feminine society which was beginning to write our novels was

represented by Miss Burney and Hannah More; and the thriving booksellers

who were beginning to become publishers, such as Strahan and the Dillys,

at whose house he had the famous meeting with the reprobate Wilkes. To

many of us, I suppose, an intimacy with that Johnsonian group has been a

first introduction to an interest in English literature. Thanks to

Boswell, we can hear its talk more distinctly than that of any later

circle. When we compare it to the society of an earlier time, one or two

points are conspicuous. Johnson's club was to some extent a continuation

of the clubs of Queen Anne's time. But the Wits of the earlier period

who met at taverns to drink with the patrons were a much smaller and

more dependent body. What had since happened had been the growth of a

great comfortable middle-class--meaning by middle-class the upper

stratum, the professional men, the lawyers, clergymen, physicians, the

merchants who had been enriched by the growth of commerce and

manufactures; the country gentlemen whose rents had risen, and who could

come to London and rub off their old rusticity. The aristocracy is still

in possession of great wealth and political power, but beneath it has

grown up an independent society which is already beginning to be the

most important social stratum and the chief factor in political and

social development. It has sufficient literary cultivation to admit the

distinguished authors and artists who are becoming independent enough to

take their place in its ranks and appear at its tables and rule the

conversation. The society is still small enough to have in the club a

single representative body and one man for dictator. Johnson succeeded

in this capacity to Pope, Dryden, and his namesake Ben, but he was the

last of the race. Men like Carlyle and Macaulay, who had a similar

distinction in later days, could only be leaders of a single group or

section in the more complex society of their time, though it was not yet

so multitudinous and chaotic as the literary class has become in our

own. Talk could still be good, because the comparatively small society

was constantly meeting, and each prepared to take his part in the game,

and was not being swept away distractedly into a miscellaneous vortex

of all sorts and conditions of humanity. Another fact is conspicuous.

The environment, we may say, of the man of letters was congenial. He

shared and uttered the opinions of the class to which he belonged.

Buckle gives a striking account of the persecution to which the French

men of letters were exposed at this period; Voltaire, Buffon, and

Rousseau, Diderot, Marmontel, and Morellet, besides a whole series of

inferior authors, had their books suppressed and were themselves either

exiled or imprisoned. There was a state of war in which almost the whole

literary class attacked the established creed while the rulers replied

by force instead of argument. In England men of letters were allowed,

with a few exceptions, to say what they thought, and simply shared the

average beliefs of their class and their rulers. If some leant towards

freethinking, the general tendency of the Johnson circle was harshly

opposed to any revolutionary movement, and authors were satisfied with

the creeds as with the institutions amid which they lived.

The English literary class was thus content to utter the beliefs

prevalent in the social stratum to which the chief writers belonged--a

stratum which had no special grievances and no revolutionary impulses,

and which could make its voice sufficiently heard though by methods

which led to no explicit change in the constitution, and suggests only a

change in the forces which really lay behind them. The chief political

changes mean for the present that 'public opinion' was acquiring more

power; that the newspaper press as its organ was especially growing in

strength; that Parliament was thrown open to the reporter, and speeches

addressed to the constituencies as well as to the Houses of Parliament,

and therefore the authority of the legislation becoming more amenable to

the opinions of the constituency. That is to say, again, that the

journalist and orator were growing in power and a corresponding

direction given to literary talent. The Wilkes agitation led to the

_Letters of Junius_--one of the most conspicuous models of the style of

the period; and some of the newspapers which were to live through the

next century began to appear in the following years. This period again

might almost be called the culminating period of English rhetoric. The

speeches of Pitt and Burke and Fox and Sheridan in the House of Commons

and at the impeachment of Warren Hastings must be regarded from the

literary as well as the political point of view, though in most cases

the decay of the temporary interests involved has been fatal to their

permanence. The speeches are still real speeches, intended to affect the

audience addressed, and yet partly intended also for the reporters. When

the audience becomes merely the pretext, and the real aim is to address

the public, the speech tends to become a pamphlet in disguise and loses

its rhetorical character. I may remark in passing that almost the only

legal speeches which, so far as my knowledge goes, are still readable,

were those of Erskine, who, after trying the careers of a sailor and a

soldier, found the true application for his powers in oratory. Though

his legal knowledge is said to have been slight, the conditions of the

time enabled him in addressing a British jury to put forward a political

manifesto and to display singular literary skill. Burke, however, is the

typical figure. Had he been a German he might have been a Lessing, and

the author of the _Sublime and Beautiful_ might, like the author of

_Laokoon_, have stimulated his countrymen by literary criticism. Or he

might have obtained a professorship or a court preachership and, like

Herder, have elaborated ideas towards the future of a philosophy of

history. In England he was drawn into the political vortex, and in that

capacity delivered speeches which also appeared as pamphlets, and which

must rank among the great masterpieces of English literature. I need not

inquire whether he lost more by giving to party what was meant for

mankind, or whether his philosophy did not gain more by the necessity of

constant application to the actual facts of the time. That necessity no

doubt limited both the amount and the systematic completeness of his

writings, though it also emphasised some of their highest merits. The

English political order tended in any case to divert a great deal of

literary ability into purely political channels--a peculiarity which it

has not yet lost. Burke is the typical instance of this combination, and

illustrates most forcibly the point to which I have already adverted.

Johnson, as we know, was a mass of obstinate Tory prejudice, and held

that the devil was the first Whig. He held at bottom, I think, that

politics touched only the surface of human life; that 'kings or laws,'

as he put it, can cause or cure only a small part of the evils which we

suffer, and that some authority is absolutely necessary, and that it

matters little whether it be the authority of a French monarch or an

English parliament. The Whig he thought objected to authority on

principle, and was therefore simply subversive. Something of the same

opinion was held by Johnson's circle in general. They were conservative

both in politics and theology, and English politics and theological

disputes did not obviously raise the deeper issues. Even the

devil-descended Whig--especially the variety represented by Burke--was

as far as possible from representing what he took for the diabolic

agency. Burke represents above all things the political application of

the historical spirit of the period. His hatred for metaphysics, for

discussions of abstract rights instead of practical expediency; his

exaltation of 'prescription' and 'tradition'; his admiration for

Montesquieu and his abhorrence of Rousseau; his idolatry of the British

constitution, and in short his whole political doctrine from first to

last, implies the profound conviction of the truth of the principles

embodied in a thorough historical method. Nobody, I think, was ever more

consistent in his first principles, though his horror of the Revolution

no doubt led him so to exaggerate one side of his teaching that he was

led to denounce some of the consequences which naturally followed from

other aspects of his doctrine. The schism between the old and the new

Whigs was not to be foreseen during this period, nor the coming into the

foreground of the deeper problems involved.

I may now come to the purely literary movement. I have tried to show

that neither in philosophy, theology, nor political and social strata,

was there any belief in the necessity of radical changes, or prescience

of a coming alteration of the intellectual atmosphere. Speculation, like

politics, could advance quietly along the old paths without fearing that

they might lead to a precipice; and society, in spite of very vigorous

and active controversy upon the questions which decided it was in the

main self-satisfied, complacent, and comfortable. Adherence to the old

system is after all the general rule, and it is of the change not the

persistence that we require some account. At the beginning of our

period, Pope's authority was still generally admitted, although many

symptoms of discontent had appeared, and Warton was proposing to lower

him from the first to the second rank. The two most brilliant writers

who achieved fame in the early years of George III., Goldsmith and

Sterne, mark a characteristic moment in the literary development.

Goldsmith's poems the _Traveller_ (1765) and the _Deserted Village_

(1770), and the _Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766), are still on the old lines.

The poetry adopts Pope's versification, and implies the same ideal; the

desire for lucidity, sympathy, moderation, and the qualities which would

generally be connoted by classical. The substance, distinguished from

the style, shows the sympathy with sentimentalism of which Rousseau was

to be the great exponent. Goldsmith is beginning to denounce luxury--a

characteristic mark of the sentimentalist--and his regret for the period

when 'every rood of earth maintained its man' is one side of the

aspiration for a return to the state of nature and simplicity of

manners. The inimitable Vicar recalls Sir Roger de Coverley and the

gentle and delicate touch of Addison. But the Vicar is beginning to take

an interest in philanthropy. He is impressed by the evils of the old

prison system which had already roused Oglethorpe (who like

Goldsmith--as I may notice--disputed with Johnson as to the evils of

luxury) and was soon to arouse Howard. The greatest attraction of the

Vicar is due to the personal charm of Goldsmith's character, but his

character makes him sympathise with the wider social movements and the

growth of genuine philanthropic sentiment. Goldsmith, in his remarks

upon the _Present State of Polite Learning_ (1759), explains the decay

of literature (literature is always decaying) by the general enervation

which accompanies learning and the want of originality caused by the

growth of criticism. That was not an unnatural view at a time when the

old forms are beginning to be inadequate for the new thoughts which are

seeking for utterance. As yet, however, Goldsmith's own work proves

sufficiently that the new motive could be so far adapted to the old form

as to produce an artistic masterpiece. Sterne may illustrate a similar

remark. He represents, no doubt, a kind of sham sentimentalism with an

insincerity which has disgusted many able critics. He was resolved to

attract notice at any price--by putting on cap and bells, and by the

pruriency which stains his best work. Like many contemporaries he was

reading old authors and turned them to account in a way which exposed

him to the charge of plagiarism. He valued them for their quaintness.

They enabled him to satisfy his propensity for being deliberately

eccentric which made Horace Walpole call _Tristram Shandy_ the 'dregs of

nonsense,' and the learned Dr. Farmer prophesied that in twenty years it

would be necessary to search antiquarian shops for a copy. Sterne's

great achievement, however, was not in the mere buffoonery but in the

passages where he continued the Addison tradition. Uncle Toby is a

successor of Sir Roger, and the famous death of Lefevre is told with

inimitable simplicity and delicacy of touch. Goldsmith and Sterne work

upon the old lines, but make use of the new motives and materials which

are beginning to interest readers, and which will in time call for

different methods of treatment.

I must briefly indicate one other point. The society of which Garrick

was a member, and which was both reading Shakespeare and seeing his

plays revived, might well seem fitted to maintain a drama. Goldsmith

complains of the decay of the stage, which he attributes partly to the

exclusion of new pieces by the old Shakespearian drama. On that point he

agrees as far as he dares with Voltaire. He ridiculed Home's _Douglas_,

one of the last tragedies which made even a temporary success, and which

certainly showed that the true impulse was extinct. But Goldsmith and

his younger contemporary Sheridan succeeded for a time in restoring

vigour to comedy. Their triumph over the sentimentalists Kelly and

Cumberland showed, as Johnson put it, that they could fill the aim of

the comedian, namely, making an audience merry. _She Stoops to Conquer_

and _The School for Scandal_ remain among genuine literary masterpieces.

They are revivals of the old Congreve method, and imply the growth of a

society more decent and free from the hard cynical brutality which

disgraced the earlier writers. I certainly cannot give a sufficient

reason why the society of Johnson and Reynolds, full of shrewd common

sense, enjoying humour, and with a literary social tradition, should not

have found other writers capable of holding up the comic mirror. I am

upon the verge of a discussion which seems to be endless, the causes of

the decay of the British stage. I must give it a wide berth, and only

note that, as a fact, Sheridan took to politics, and his mantle fell on

no worthy successor. The next craze (for which he was partly

responsible) was the German theatre of Kotzebue, which represented the

intrusion of new influences and the production of a great quantity of

rubbish. After Goldsmith the poetic impulse seems to have decayed

entirely. After the _Deserted Village_ (1770) no striking work appeared

till Crabbe published his first volume (1781), and was followed by his

senior Cowper in 1782. Both of them employed the metre of Pope, though

Cowper took to blank verse; and Crabbe, though he had read and admired

Spenser, was to the end of his career a thorough disciple of Pope.

Johnson read and revised his _Village_, which was thoroughly in harmony

with the old gentleman's poetic creed. Yet both Cowper and Crabbe

stimulate what may be called in some sense 'a return to nature'; though

not in such a way as to announce a literary revolution. Each was

restrained by personal conditions. Cowper's poetical aims were

profoundly affected by his religious views. The movement which we call

Methodist was essentially moral and philanthropic. It agreed so far with

Rousseau's sentimentalism that it denounced the corruptions of the

existing order; but instead of attributing the evils to the departure

from the ideal state of nature, expressed them by the theological

doctrine of the corruption of the human heart. That implied in some

senses a fundamental difference. But there was a close coincidence in

the judgment of actual motives. Cowper fully agreed with Rousseau that

our rulers had become selfish and luxurious; that war was kept up to

satisfy the ambition of kings and courtiers; that vice flourished

because the aims of our rulers and teachers were low and selfish, and

that slavery was a monstrous evil supported by the greed of traders.

Brown's _Estimate_, he said, was thoroughly right as to our degeneracy,

though Brown had not perceived the deepest root of the evil. Cowper's

satire has lost its salt because he had retired too completely from the

world to make a telling portrait. But he succeeds most admirably when he

finds relief from the tortures of insanity by giving play to the

exquisite playfulness and tenderness which was never destroyed by his

melancholy. He delights us by an unconscious illustration of the simple

domestic life in the quiet Olney fields, which we see in another form in

the charming White of Selborne. He escapes from the ghastly images of

religious insanity when he has indulged in the innocent play of tender

and affectionate emotions, which finds itself revealed in tranquillising

scenery. The literary result is a fresh appreciation of 'Nature.' Pope's

Nature has become for him artificial and conventional. From a religious

point of view it represents 'cold morality,' and the substitution of

logical argumentation for the language of the heart. It suggests the

cynicism of the heartless fine gentleman who sneers at Wesley and

Bunyan, and covers his want of feeling by a stilted deism. Cowper tried

unsuccessfully to supersede Pope's _Homer_; in trying to be simple he

became bald; but he also tried most successfully to express with

absolute sincerity the simple and deep emotions of an exquisitely tender

character.

Crabbe meanwhile believed in Pope, and had a sturdy solid contempt for

Methodism. Cowper's guide, Newton, would have passed with him for a

nuisance and a fanatic. Crabbe is a thorough realist. In some ways he

may be compared to his contemporary Malthus. Malthus started, as we

know, by refuting the sentimentalism of Rousseau; Crabbe's _Village_ is

a protest against the embodiment of the same spirit in Goldsmith. He is

determined to see things as they are, with no rose-coloured mist. Crabbe

replies to critics that if his realism was unpoetical, the criterion

suggested would condemn much of Dryden and Pope as equally unpoetical.

He was not renouncing but carrying on the tradition, and was admired by

Byron in his rather wayward mood of Pope-worship as the last

representative of the legitimate school. The position is significant.

Crabbe condemns Goldsmith's 'Nature' because it is 'unnatural.' It means

the Utopian ideal of Rousseau which never did and never can exist. It

belongs to the world of old-fashioned pastoral poetry, in which Corydon

and Thyrsis had their being. He will paint British squires and farmers

and labourers as he has seen them with his own eyes. The wit has become

for him the mere fop, whose poetry is an arbitrary convention, a mere

plaything for the fine ladies and gentlemen detached from the living

interests of mankind. The Pope tradition is still maintained, but is to

be revised by being brought down again to contact with solid earth.

Therefore on the one hand he is thoroughly in harmony with Johnson, the

embodiment of common sense, and on the other, excited the enthusiasm of

Wordsworth and Scott, who, though leaders of a new movement, heartily

sympathised with his realism and rejection of the old conventionalism.

Though Crabbe regards Cowper's religion as fanaticism, they are so far

agreed that both consider that poetry has become divorced from reality

and reflects the ugly side of actual human nature. They do not propose a

revolution in its methods, but to put fresh life into it by seeing

things as they are. And both of them, living in the country, apply the

principle to 'Nature' in the sense of scenery. Cowper gives interest to

the flat meadows of the Ouse; and Crabbe, a botanist and lover of

natural history, paints with unrivalled fidelity and force the flat

shores and tideways of his native East Anglia. They are both therefore

prophets of a love of Nature, in one of the senses of the Protean word.

Cowper, who prophesied the fall of the Bastille and denounced luxury,

was to some extent an unconscious ally of Rousseau, though he regarded

the religious aspects of Rousseau's doctrine as shallow and

unsatisfactory. Crabbe shows the attitude of which Johnson is the most

characteristic example. Johnson was thoroughly content with the old

school in so far as it meant that poetry must be thoroughly rational and

sensible. His hatred of cant and foppery was so far congenial to the

tradition; but it implied a difference. To him Pope's metaphysical

system was mere foppery, and the denunciation of luxury mere cant. He

felt mere contempt for Goldsmith's flirtation with that vein of

sentiment. His dogged conservatism prevented him from recognising the

strength of the philosophical movements which were beginning to clothe

themselves in Rousseauism. Burke, if he condemned the revolutionary

doctrine as wicked, saw distinctly how potent a lesson it was becoming.

Johnson, showing the true British indifference, could treat the movement

with contempt--Hume's scepticism was a mere 'milking the bull'--a love

of paradox for its own sake--and Wilkes and the Whigs, though wicked in

intention, were simple and superficial dealers in big words. In the

literary application the same sturdy common sense was opposed to the

Pope tradition so far as that tradition opposed common sense.

Conventional diction, pastorals, and twaddle about Nature belonged to

the nonsensical side. He entirely sympathised with Crabbe's substitution

of the real living brutish clown for the unreal swain of Arcadia; that

is, for developing poetry by making it thoroughly realistic even at the

cost of being prosaic.

So far the tendency to realism was thoroughly congenial to the

matter-of-fact utilitarian spirit of the time, and was in some sense in

harmony with a 'return to Nature.' But it was unconsciously becoming

divorced from some of the great movements of thought, of which it failed

to perceive the significance. A new inspiration was showing itself, to

which critics have done at least ample justice. The growth of history

had led to renewed interest in much that had been despised as mere

curiosities or ridiculed as implying the barbarism of our ancestors. I

have already noticed the dilettantism of the previous generation, and

the interest of Gray and Collins and Warton and Walpole in antiquarian

researches. Gothic had ceased to be a simple term of reproach. The old

English literature is beginning to be studied seriously. Pope and

Warburton and Johnson had all edited Shakespeare; Garrick had given him

fresh popularity, and the first edition of _Old Plays_ by Dodsley

appeared in 1744. Similar studies were extending in many directions.

Mallet in his work upon Denmark (1755) gave a translation of the _Eddas_

which called attention to Scandinavian mythology. Bodmer soon

afterwards published for the first time the _Nibelungen Lied_.

Macpherson startled the literary world in 1762 by what professed to be

an epic poem from the Gaelic. Chatterton's career (1752-1770) was a

proof not only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility

in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's

_Reliques_ appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough

by publishing a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation of Icelandic

poetry (1763). Not long afterwards Sir William Jones published

translations of Oriental poetry. Briefly, as historical, philological,

and antiquarian research extended, the man of letters was also beginning

to seek for new 'motives,' and to discover merits in old forms of

literature. The importance of this new impulse cannot be over-estimated,

but it may be partly misinterpreted. It is generally described as a

foretaste of what is called the Romantic movement. The word is no doubt

very useful--though exceedingly vague. The historian of literature is

sometimes given to speak as though it meant the revelation of a new and

definite creed. He speaks, that is, like the historian of science, who

accepts Darwinism as the revelation of a new principle transfusing the

old conceptions, and traces the various anticipations, the seminal idea;

or like the Protestant theologian who used to regard Luther as having

announced the full truth dimly foreseen by Wicliff or the Albigenses.

Romanticism, that is, is treated as a single movement; while the men who

share traces of the taste are supposed to have not only foreseen the new

doctrine but to have been the actual originators. Yet I think that all

competent writers will also agree that Romanticism is a name which has

been applied to a number of divergent or inconsistent schools. It seems

to mean every impulse which tended to find the old clothing inadequate

for the new thoughts, which caused dissatisfaction with the old

philosophical and religious or political systems and aspirations, and

took a corresponding variety of literary forms. It is far too complex a

phenomenon to be summed up in any particular formula. The mischief is

that to take the literary evolution as an isolated phenomenon is to miss

an essential clue to such continuity and unity as it really possesses.

When we omit the social factor, the solidarity which exists between

contemporaries occupied with the same problem and sharing certain common

beliefs, each school appears as an independent unit, implying a

discontinuity or a simple relation of contrariety, and we explain the

succession by such a verbal phrase as 'reaction.' The real problem is,

what does the reaction mean? and that requires us to take into account

the complex and variously composed currents of thought and reason which

are seeking for literary expression. The popularity of _Ossian_ for

example, is a curious phenomenon. At the first sight we are disposed to

agree with Johnson that any man could write such stuff if he would

abandon his mind to it, and to add that if any one would write it no one

could read it. Yet we know that _Ossian_ appealed to the gigantic

intellects of Goethe and Napoleon. That is a symptom of deep

significance; _Ossian_ suited Goethe in the _Werther_ period and

Napoleon took it with him when he was dreaming of rivalling Alexander's

conquests in the East. We may perhaps understand why the gigantesque

pictures in _Ossian_ of the northern mountains and scenery--with all its

vagueness, incoherence, and bombast, was somehow congenial to minds

dissatisfied, for different reasons, with the old ideals. To explain the

charm more precisely is a very pretty problem for the acute critic.

_Ossian_, it is clear, fell in with the mood characteristic of the

time. But when we ask what effect it produced in English literature, the

answer must surely be, 'next to none.' Gray was enthusiastic and tried

to believe in its authenticity. Scots, like Blair and even the sceptical

Hume--though Hume soon revolted--defended _Ossian_ out of patriotic

prejudice, and Burns professed to admire. But nobody in Great Britain

took to writing Ossianesque. Wordsworth was simply disgusted by the

unreality, and nothing could be less in the _Ossian_ vein than Burns.

The _Ossian_ craze illustrates the extension of historical interest, of

which I have spoken, and the vague discontent of Wertherism. But I do

not see how the publication can be taken as the cause of a new

departure, although it was an indication of the state of mind which led

to a new departure. Percy's _Reliques_, again, is often mentioned as an

'epoch-making' book. Undoubtedly it was a favourite with Scott and many

other readers of his generation. But how far did it create any change of

taste? The old ballad was on one side congenial to the classical school,

as Addison showed by his criticism of _Chevy Chase_ for its simple

version of a heroic theme. Goldsmith tried his hand at a ballad about

the same time with Percy, and both showed that they were a little too

much afraid that simplicity might degenerate into childishness, and gain

Johnson's contempt. But there was nothing in the old school incompatible

with a rather patronising appreciation of the popular poetry. It gained

fresh interest when the historical tendency gave a newer meaning to the

old society in which ballad poetry had flourished.

This suggests the last remark which I have room to make. One

characteristic of the period is a growth of provincial centres of some

intellectual culture. As manufactures extended, and manufacturers began

to read, circles of some literary pretensions sprang up in Norwich,

Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester; and most conspicuously in

Edinburgh. Though the Scot was coming south in numbers which alarmed

Johnson, there were so many eminent Scots at home during this time that

Edinburgh seems at least to have rivalled London as an intellectual

centre. The list of great men includes Hume and Adam Smith, Robertson

and Hailes and Adam Ferguson, Kames, Monboddo, and Dugald Stewart among

philosophers and historians; John Home, Blair, G. Campbell, Beattie, and

Henry Mackenzie among men of letters; Hutton, Black, Cullen, and

Gregory among scientific leaders. Scottish patriotism then, as at other

periods, was vigorous, and happily ceasing to be antagonistic to

unionist sentiment. The Scot admitted that he was touched by

provincialism; but he retained a national pride, and only made the

modest and most justifiable claim that he was intrinsically superior to

the Southron. He still preserved intellectual and social traditions, and

cherished them the more warmly, which marked him as a distinct member of

the United Kingdom. In Scotland the rapid industrial development had

given fresh life to the whole society without obliterating its

distinctive peculiarities. Song and ballad and local legends were still

alive, and not merely objects of literary curiosity. It was under such

conditions that Burns appeared, the greatest beyond compare of all the

self-taught poets. Now there can be no explanation whatever of the

occurrence of a man of genius at a given time and place. For anything we

can say, Burns was an accident; but given the genius, his relation was

clear, and the genius enabled him to recognise it with unequalled

clearness. Burns became, as he has continued, the embodiment of the

Scottish genius. Scottish patriotic feeling animates some of his

noblest poems, and whether as an original writer--and no one could be

more original--or as adapting and revising the existing poetry, he

represents the essential spirit of the Scottish peasant. I need not

point out that this implies certain limitations, and some failings worse

than limitation. But it implies also the spontaneous and masculine

vigour which we may call poetic inspiration of the highest kind. He had

of course read the English authors such as Addison and Pope. So far as

he tried to imitate the accepted form he was apt to lose his fire. He is

inspired when he has a nation behind him and is the mouthpiece of

sentiments, traditional, but also living and vigorous. He represents,

therefore, a new period. The lyrical poetry seemed to have died out in

England. It suddenly comes to life in Scotland and reaches unsurpassable

excellence within certain limits, because a man of true genius rises to

utter the emotions of a people in their most natural form without

bothering about canons of literary criticism. The society and the

individual are in thorough harmony, and that, I take it, is the

condition of really great literature at all times.

This must suggest my concluding moral. The watchword of every literary

school may be brought under the formula 'Return to Nature': though

'Nature' receives different interpretations. To be natural, on the one

hand, is to be sincere and spontaneous; to utter the emotions natural to

you in the forms which are also natural, so far as the accepted canons

are not rules imposed by authority but have been so thoroughly

assimilated as to express your own instinctive impulses. On the other

side, it means that the literature must be produced by the class which

embodies the really vital and powerful currents of thought which are

moulding society. The great author must have a people behind him; utter

both what he really thinks and feels and what is thought and felt most

profoundly by his contemporaries. As the literature ceases to be truly

representative, and adheres to the conventionalism of the former period,

it becomes 'unnatural' and the literary forms become a survival instead

of a genuine creation. The history of eighteenth century literature

illustrates this by showing how as the social changes give new influence

to the middle classes and then to the democracy, the aristocratic class

which represented the culture of the opening stage is gradually pushed

aside; its methods become antiquated and its conventions cease to

represent the ideals of the most vigorous part of the population. The

return to Nature with Pope and Addison and Swift meant, get rid of

pedantry, be thoroughly rational, and take for your guide the bright

common sense of the Wit and the scholar. During Pope's supremacy the Wit

who represents the aristocracy produces some admirably polished work;

but the development of journalism and Grub Street shows that he is

writing to satisfy the popular interests so keenly watched by Defoe in

Grub Street. In the period of Richardson and Fielding Nature has become

the Nature of the middle-class John Bull. The old romances have become

hopelessly unnatural, and they will give us portraits of living human

beings, whether Clarissa or Tom Jones. The rationalism of the higher

class strikes them as cynical, and the generation which listens to

Wesley must have also a secular literature, which, whether sentimental

as with Richardson or representing common sense with Fielding, must at

any rate correspond to solid substantial matter-of-fact motives,

intelligible to the ordinary Briton of the time. In the last period, the

old literary conventions, though retaining their old literary prestige,

are becoming threadbare while preserving the old forms. Even the

Johnsonian conservatism implies hatred for cant, for mere foppery and

sham sentimentalism; and though it uses them, insists with Crabbe upon

keeping in contact with fact. We must be 'realistic,' though we can

retain the old literary forms. The appeal to Nature, meanwhile, has come

with Rousseau and the revolutionists to mean something different--the

demand, briefly, for a thorough-going reconstruction of the whole

philosophical and social fabric. To the good old Briton, Whig or Tory,

that seemed to be either diabolical or mere Utopian folly. To him the

British constitution is still thoroughly congenial and 'natural.'

Meanwhile intellectual movement has introduced a new element. The

historical sense is being developed, as a settled society with a complex

organisation becomes conscious at once of its continuity and of the slow

processes of growth by which it has been elaborated. The fusion of

English and Scottish nations stimulates the patriotism of the smaller

though better race, and generates a passionate enthusiasm for the old

literature which represents the characteristic genius of the smaller

community. Burns embodies the sentiment, though without any conscious

reference to theories philosophical or historical. The significance was

to be illustrated by Scott--an equally fervid patriot. He tells Crabbe

how oddly a passage in the _Village_ was associated in his memory with

border-riding ballads and scraps of old plays. 'Nature' for Scott meant

'his honest grey hills' speaking in every fold of old traditional lore.

That meant, in one sense, that Scott was not only romantic but

reactionary. That was his weakness. But if he was the first to make the

past alive, he was also the first to make the present historical. His

masterpieces are not his descriptions of mediæval knights so much as the

stories in which he illuminates the present by his vivid presentation of

the present order as the outgrowth from the old, and makes the Scottish

peasant or lawyer or laird interesting as a product and a type of social

conditions. Nature therefore to him includes the natural processes by

which society has been developed under the stress of circumstances.

Nothing could be more unnatural for him than the revolutionary principle

which despises tradition and regards the patriotic sentiment as

superfluous and irrational. Wordsworth represents again another sense of

Nature. He announced as his special principle that poetry should speak

the language of Nature, and therefore, as he inferred, of the ordinary

peasant and uneducated man. The hills did not speak to him of legend or

history but of the sentiment of the unsophisticated yeoman or

'statesman.' He sympathised enthusiastically with the French Revolution

so long as he took it to utter the simple republican sentiment congenial

to a small society of farmers and shepherds. He abandoned it when he

came to think that it really meant the dissolution of the religious and

social sentiments which correspond to the deepest instincts which bound

such men together. Coleridge represents a variation. He was the first

Englishman to be affected by the philosophical movement of Germany. He

had been an ardent revolutionist in the days when he adopted the

metaphysics of Hartley and Priestley, which fell in with the main

eighteenth-century current of scepticism. He came to think that the

movement represented a perversion of the intellect. It meant materialism

and scepticism, or interpreted Nature as a mere dead mechanism. It

omitted, therefore, the essential element which is expressed by what we

may roughly call the mystical tendency in philosophy. Nature must be

taken as the embodiment of a divine idea. Nature, therefore, in his

poetry, is regarded not from Scott's point of view as subordinate to

human history, or from Wordsworth's as teaching the wisdom of

unsophisticated mankind, but rather as a symbolism legible to the higher

imagination. Though his fine critical sense made him keep his philosophy

and his poetry distinct, that is the common tendency which gives unity

to his work and which made his utterances so stimulating to congenial

intellects. His criticism of the 'Nature' of Pope and Bolingbroke would

be substantially, that in their hands the reason which professed to

interpret Nature became cold and materialistic, because its logic left

out of account the mysterious but essential touches revealed only to the

heart, or, in his language, to the reason but not to the understanding.

Meanwhile, though the French revolutionary doctrines were preached in

England, they only attracted the literary leaders for a time, and it was

not till the days of Byron and Shelley that they found thorough-going

representatives in English poetry. On that, however, I must not speak.

I have tried to indicate briefly how Scott and Wordsworth and Coleridge,

the most eminent leaders of the new school, partly represented movements

already obscurely working in England, and how they were affected by the

new ideas which had sprung to life elsewhere. They, like their

predecessors, are essentially trying to cast aside the literary

'survivals' of effete conditions, and succeed so far as they could find

adequate expression for the great ideas of their time.

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University Press