Social changes.
In the reign of Anne (1702-1714) the social changes which had commenced
with the Restoration of 1660 began to make themselves definitely felt.
Books began to penetrate among all classes of society. The period is
consequently one of differentiation and expansion. As the practice of
reading becomes more and more universal, English writers lose much of
their old idiosyncrasy, intensity and obscurity. As in politics and
religion, so in letters, there is a great development of nationality.
Commercial considerations too for the first time become important. We
hear relatively far less of religious controversy, of the bickering
between episcopalians and nonconformists and of university squabbles.
Specialization and cumbrous pedantry fall into profound disfavour.
Provincial feeling exercises a diminishing sway, and literature becomes
increasingly metropolitan or suburban. With the multiplication of
moulds, the refinement of prose polish, and the development of breadth,
variety and ease, it was natural enough, having regard to the place that
the country played in the world's affairs, that English literature
should make its debut in western Europe. The strong national savour
seemed to stimulate the foreign appetite, and as represented by Swift,
Pope, Defoe, Young, Goldsmith, Richardson, Sterne and Ossian, if we
exclude Byron and Scott, the 18th century may be deemed the cosmopolitan
age, _par excellence_, of English Letters. The charms of 18th-century
English literature, as it happens, are essentially of the rational,
social and translatable kind: in intensity, exquisiteness and
eccentricity of the choicer kinds it is proportionately deficient. It is
pre-eminently an age of prose, and although verbal expression is seldom
represented at its highest power, we shall find nearly every variety of
English prose brilliantly illustrated during this period: the
aristocratic style of Bolingbroke, Addison and Berkeley; the gentlemanly
style of Fielding; the keen and logical controversy of Butler,
Middleton, Smith and Bentham; the rhythmic and balanced if occasionally
involved style of Johnson and his admirers; the limpid and flowing
manner of Hume and Mackintosh; the light, easy and witty flow of
Walpole; the divine chit-chat of Cowper; the colour of Gray and
Berkeley; the organ roll of Burke; the detective journalism of Swift and
Defoe; the sly familiarity of Sterne; the dance music and wax candles
of Sheridan; the pomposity of Gibbon; the air and ripple of Goldsmith;
the peeping preciosity of Boswell,--these and other characteristics can
be illustrated in 18th-century prose as probably nowhere else.
But more important to the historian of literature even than the
development of qualities is the evolution of types. And in this respect
the 18th century is a veritable index-museum of English prose.
Essentially, no doubt, it is true that in form the prose and verse of
the 18th century is mainly an extension of Dryden, just as in content it
is a reflection of the increased variety of the city life which came
into existence as English trade rapidly increased in all directions. But
the taste of the day was rapidly changing. People began to read in
vastly increasing numbers. The folio was making place on the shelves for
the octavo. The bookseller began to transcend the mere tradesman. Along
with newspapers the advertizing of books came into fashion, and the
market was regulated no longer by what learned men wanted to write, but
what an increasing multitude wanted to read. The arrival of the octavo
is said to have marked the enrolment of man as a reader, that of the
novel the attachment of woman. Hence, among other causes, the rapid
decay of lyrical verse and printed drama, of theology and epic, in
ponderous tomes. The fashionable types of which the new century was to
witness the fixation are accordingly the essay and the satire as
represented respectively by Addison and Steele, Swift and Goldsmith, and
by Pope and Churchill. Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, was the first Englishman who treated letter-writing as an art
upon a considerable scale. Personalities and memoirs prepare the way for
history, in which as a department of literature English letters hitherto
had been almost scandalously deficient. Similarly the new growth of
fancy essay (Addison) and plain biography (Defoe) prepared the way for
the English novel, the most important by far of all new literary
combinations. Finally, without going into unnecessary detail, we have a
significant development of topography, journalism and criticism. In the
course of time, too, we shall perceive how the pressure of town life and
the logic of a capital city engender, first a fondness for landscape
gardening and a somewhat artificial Arcadianism, and then, by degrees,
an intensifying love of the country, of the open air, and of the rare,
exotic and remote in literature.
Locke: Addison.
At the outset of the new century the two chief architects of public
opinion were undoubtedly John Locke and Joseph Addison. When he died at
High Laver in October 1704 at the mature age of seventy-two, Locke had,
perhaps, done more than any man of the previous century to prepare the way
for the new era. Social duty and social responsibility were his two
watchwords. The key to both he discerned in the _Human Understanding_--"no
province of knowledge can be regarded as independent of reason." But the
great modernist of the time was undoubtedly Joseph Addison (1672-1719). He
first left the 17th century, with its stiff euphuisms, its formal
obsequiousness, its ponderous scholasticism and its metaphorical
antitheses, definitely behind. He did for English culture what Rambouillet
did for that of France, and it is hardly an exaggeration to call the
half-century before the great fame of the English novel, the half century
of the _Spectator_.
Steele.
Addison's mind was fertilized by intercourse with the greater and more
original genius of Swift and with the more inventive and more genial
mind of Steele. It was Richard Steele (1672-1729) in the _Tatler_ of
1709-1710 who first realized that the specific which that urbane age
both needed and desired was no longer copious preaching and rigorous
declamation, but homoeopathic doses of good sense, good taste and
good-humoured morality, disguised beneath an easy and fashionable style.
Nothing could have suited Addison better than the opportunity afforded
him of contributing an occasional essay or roundabout paper in praise of
virtue or dispraise of stupidity and bad form to his friend's
periodical. When the _Spectator_ succeeded the _Tatler_ in March 1711,
Addison took a more active share in shaping the chief characters (with
the immortal baronet, Sir Roger, at their head) who were to make up the
"Spectator Club"; and, better even than before, he saw his way, perhaps,
to reinforcing his copious friend with his own more frugal but more
refined endowment. Such a privileged talent came into play at precisely
the right moment to circulate through the coffee houses and to convey a
large measure of French courtly ease and elegance into the more humdrum
texture of English prose. Steele became rather disreputable in his later
years, Swift was banished and went mad, but Addison became a personage
of the utmost consideration, and the essay as he left it became an
almost indispensable accomplishment to the complete gentlemen of that
age. As an architect of opinion from 1717 to 1775 Addison may well rank
with Locke.
Swift.
Arbuthnot.
Bolingbroke.
The other side, both in life and politics, was taken by Jonathan Swift
(1667-1745), who preferred to represent man on his unsocial side. He
sneered at most things, but not at his own order, and he came to defend
the church and the country squirearchy against the conventicle and Capel
court. To undermine the complacent entrenchments of the Whig capitalists
at war with France no sap proved so effectual as his pen. Literary
influence was then exercised in politics mainly by pamphlets, and Swift
was the greatest of pamphleteers. In the _Journal to Stella_ he has left
us a most wonderful portrait of himself in turn currying favour,
spoiled, petted and humiliated by the party leaders of the Tories from
1710-1713. He had always been savage, and when the Hanoverians came in
and he was treated as a suspect, his hate widened to embrace all mankind
(_Gulliver's Travels_, 1726) and he bit like a mad dog. Would that he
could have bitten more, for the infection of English stylists! In wit,
logic, energy, pith, resourcefulness and Saxon simplicity, his prose has
never been equalled. The choicest English then, it is the choicest
English still. Dr John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) may be described as an
understudy of Swift on the whimsical side only, whose malignity, in a
nature otherwise most kindly, was circumscribed strictly by the limits
of political persiflage. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), unorthodox as
he was in every respect, discovered a little of Swift's choice pessimism
in his assault (in _The Fable of the Bees_ of 1723) against the genteel
optimism of the _Characteristics_ of Lord Shaftesbury. Neither the
matter nor the manner of the brilliant Tory chieftain Henry St John,
Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), appears to us now as being of the
highest significance; but, although Bolingbroke's ideas were
second-hand, his work has an historical importance; his dignified,
balanced and decorated style was the cynosure of 18th-century statesmen.
His essays on "History" and on "a Patriot King" both disturb a soil well
prepared, and set up a reaction against such evil tendencies as a
narrowing conception of history and a primarily factious and partisan
conception of politics. It may be noted here how the fall of Bolingbroke
and the Tories in 1714 precipitated the decay of the Renaissance ideal
of literary patronage. The dependence of the press upon the House of
Lords was already an anomaly, and the practical toleration achieved in
1695 removed another obstacle from the path of liberation. The
government no longer sought to strangle the press. It could generally be
tuned satisfactorily and at the worst could always be temporarily
muzzled. The pensions hitherto devoted to men of genius were diverted
under Walpole to spies and journalists. Yet one of the most unscrupulous
of all the fabricators of intelligence, looked down upon as a huckster
of the meanest and most inconsiderable literary wares, established his
fame by a masterpiece of which literary genius had scarcely even
cognizance.
Defoe.
The new trade of writing was represented most perfectly by Daniel Defoe
(1660-1731), who represents, too, what few writers possess, a competent
knowledge of work and wages, buying and selling, the squalor and roguery
of the very hungry and the very mean. From reporting sensations and
chronicling _faits divers_, Defoe worked his way almost insensibly to
the Spanish tale of the old Mendoza or picaresque pattern. _Robinson
Crusoe_ was a true story expanded on these lines, and written down under
stress of circumstance when its author was just upon sixty. Resembling
that of Bunyan and, later, Smollett in the skilful use made of places,
facts and figures, Defoe's style is the mirror of man in his shirt
sleeves. What he excelled in was plain, straightforward story-telling,
in understanding and appraising the curiosity of the man in the street,
and in possessing just the knowledge and just the patience, and just the
literary stroke that would enable him most effectually to satisfy it. He
was the first and cleverest of all descriptive reporters, for he knew
better than any successor how and where to throw in those irrelevant
details, tricks of speech and circumlocution, which tend to give an air
of verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative--the funny little
splutterings and naivetes as of a plain man who is not telling a tale
for effect, but striving after his own manner to give the plain
unvarnished truth. Defoe contributes story, Addison character, Fielding
the life-atmosphere, Richardson and Sterne the sentiment, and we have
the 18th-century novel complete--the greatest literary birth of modern
time. Addison, Steele, Swift and Defoe, as master-builders of prose
fiction, are consequently of more importance than the "Augustan poets,"
as Pope and his school are sometimes called, for the most that they can
be said to have done is to have perfected a more or less transient mode
of poetry.
Pope.
Thomson.
Collins. Gray.
To the passion, imagination or musical quality essential to the most
inspired kinds of poetry Alexander Pope (1688-1744) can lay small claim.
His best work is contained in the _Satires_ and _Epistles_, which are
largely of the proverb-in-rhyme order. Yet in lucid, terse and pungent
phrases he has rarely if ever been surpassed. His classical fancy, his
elegant turn for periphrasis and his venomous sting alike made him the
idol of that urbane age. Voltaire in 1726 had called him the best poet
living, and at his death his style was paramount throughout the
civilized world. It was the apotheosis of wit, point, lucidity and
technical correctness. Pope was the first Englishman to make poetry pay
(apart from patronage). He was flattered by imitation to an extent which
threatened to throw the school of poetry which he represented into
permanent discredit. Prior, Gay, Parnell, Akenside, Pomfret, Garth,
Young, Johnson, Goldsmith, Falconer, Glover, Grainger, Darwin, Rogers,
Hayley and indeed a host of others--the once famous mob of gentlemen who
wrote with ease--worshipped Pope as their poetic founder. The
second-rate wore his badge. But although the cult of Pope was the
established religion of poetic taste from 1714 to 1798, there were
always nonconformists. The poetic revolt, indeed, was far more versatile
than the religious revival of the century. The _Winter_ (1726) of James
Thomson may be regarded as inaugurating a new era in English poetry.
Lady Winchilsea, John Philips, author of _Cyder_, and John Dyer, whose
_Grongar Hill_ was published a few months before _Winter_, had pleaded
by their work for a truthful and unaffected, and at the same time a
romantic treatment of nature in poetry; but the ideal of artificiality
and of a frigid poetic diction by which English poetry was dominated
since the days of Waller and Cowley was first effectively challenged by
Thomson. At the time when the Popean couplet was at the height of its
vogue he deliberately put it aside in favour of the higher poetic power
of blank verse. And he it was who transmitted the sentiment of natural
beauty not merely to imitators such as Savage, Armstrong, Somerville,
Langhorne, Mickle and Shenstone, but also to his elegist, William
Collins, to Gray and to Cowper, and so indirectly to the lyrical bards
of 1798. By the same hands and those of Shenstone experiments were being
made in the stanza of _The Faerie Queene_; a little later, owing to the
virtuosity of Bishop Percy, the cultivation of the old English and
Scottish ballad literature was beginning to take a serious turn.
Dissatisfaction with the limitations of "Augustan" poetry was similarly
responsible for the revived interest in Shakespeare and Chaucer. Gray
stood not only for a far more intimate worship of wild external nature,
but also for an awakened curiosity in Scandinavian, Celtic and Icelandic
poetry.
To pretend then that the poetic heart of the 18th century was Popean to
the core is nothing short of extravagance. There were a number of true
poets in the second and third quarters of the century to whom all
credit is due as pioneers and precentors of the romantic movement under
the depressing conditions to which innovators in poetry are commonly
subject. They may strike us as rather an anaemic band after the great
Elizabethan poets. Four of them were mentally deranged (Collins, Smart,
Cowper, Blake), while Gray was a hermit, and Shenstone and Thomson the
most indolent of recluses. The most adventurous, one might say the most
virile of the group, was a boy who died at the age of seventeen. Single
men all (save for Blake), a more despondent group of artists as a whole
it would not perhaps be easy to discover. Catacombs and cypresses were
the forms of imagery that came to them most naturally. Elegies and
funeral odes were the types of expression in which they were happiest.
Yet they strove in the main to follow the gleam in poetry, to reinstate
imagination upon its throne, and to substitute the singing voice for the
rhetorical recitative of the heroic couplet. Within two years of the
death of Pope, in 1746, William Collins was content to _sing_ (not say)
what he had in him without a glimpse of wit or a flash of eloquence--and
in him many have discerned the germ of that romantic _eclosion_ which
blossomed in _Christabel_. A more important if less original factor in
that movement was Collins's severe critic Thomas Gray, a man of the
widest curiosities of his time, in whom every attribute of the poet to
which scholarship, taste and refinement are contributory may be found to
the full, but in whom the strong creative energy is fatally
lacking--despite the fact that he wrote a string of "divine truisms" in
his _Elegy_, which has given to multitudes more of the exquisite
pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in the English language.
Shenstone and Percy, Capell, the Wartons and eventually Chatterton,
continued to mine in the shafts which Gray had been the first to sink.
Their laborious work of discovery resembled that which was commencing in
regard to the Gothic architecture which the age of Pope had come to
regard as rude and barbaric. The Augustans had come seriously to regard
all pre-Drydenic poetry as grossly barbarian. One of the greatest
achievements of the mid-eighteenth century was concerned with the
disintegration of this obstinate delusion. The process was manifold; and
it led, among other things, to a realization of the importance of the
study of comparative literature.
The novel.
Richardson.
The literary grouping of the 18th century is, perhaps, the biggest thing
on the whole that English art has to show; but among all its groups the
most famous, and probably the most original, is that of its
proto-novelists Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. All nations
have had their novels, which are as old at least as Greek vases. The
various types have generally had collective appellations such as
Milesian Tales, Alexandrian Romances, Romances of Chivalry, Acta
Sanctorum, Gesta Romanorum, Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Romances of
Roguery, Arabian Nights; but owing to the rivalry of other more popular
or more respectable or at least more eclectic literary forms, they
seldom managed to attain a permanent lodgment in the library. The taste
in prose fiction changes, perhaps, more rapidly than that in any other
kind of literature. In Britain alone several forms had passed their
prime since the days of Caxton and his Arthurian prose romance of _Morte
d'Arthur_. Such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic;
the new centos of tales of chivalry like the _Seven Champions of
Christendom_; the utopian, political and philosophical romances
(_Oceana_, _The Man in the Moone_); the grotesque and facetious stories
of rogues retailed from the Spanish or French in dwarf volumes; the
prolix romance of modernized classic heroism (_The Grand Cyrus_); the
religious allegory (Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr Badman_); the novels
of outspoken French or Italian gallantry, represented by Aphra Behn; the
imaginary voyages so notably adapted to satire by Dr Swift; and last,
but not least, the minutely prosaic chronicle-novels of Daniel Defoe.
The prospect of the novel was changing rapidly. The development of the
individual and of a large well-to-do urban middle class, which was
rapidly multiplying its area of leisure, involved a curious and
self-conscious society, hungry for pleasure and new sensations, anxious
to be told about themselves, willing in some cases even to learn
civilization from their betters. The disrepute into which the drama had
fallen since Jeremy Collier's attack on it directed this society by an
almost inevitable course into the flowery paths of fiction. The novel,
it is true, had a reputation which was for the time being almost as
unsavoury as that of the drama, but the novel was not a confirmed
ill-doer, and it only needed a touch of genius to create for it a vast
congregation of enthusiastic votaries. In the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_
were already found the methods and subjects of the modern novel. The De
Coverley papers in the _Spectator_, in fact, want nothing but a
love-thread to convert them into a serial novel of a high order. The
supreme importance of the sentimental interest had already been
discovered and exemplified to good purpose in France by Madame de la
Fayette, the Marquise de Tencin, Marivaux and the Abbe Prevost. Samuel
Richardson (1689-1762), therefore, when he produced the first two modern
novels of European fame in _Pamela_ (1740) and _Clarissa_ (1748),
inherited far more than he invented. There had been Richardsonians
before Richardson. _Clarissa_ is nevertheless a pioneer work, and we
have it on the high authority of M. Jusserand that the English have
contributed more than any other people to the formation of the
contemporary novel. Of the long-winded, typical and rather chaotic
English novel of love analysis and moral sentiment (as opposed to the
romance of adventure) Richardson is the first successful charioteer.
Fielding.
Smollett.
The novel in England gained prodigiously by the shock of opposition
between the ideals of Richardson and Henry Fielding (1707-1754), his
rival and parodist. Fielding's brutal toleration is a fine corrective to
the slightly rancid morality of Richardson, with its frank insistence
upon the cash-value of chastity and virtue. Fielding is, to be brief,
the succinct antithesis of Richardson, and represents the opposite pole
of English character. He is the Cavalier, Richardson the Roundhead; he
is the gentleman, Richardson the tradesman; he represents church and
county, Richardson chapel and borough. Richardson had much of the
patient insight and intensity of genius, but he lacked the humour and
literary accomplishment which Fielding had in rich abundance. Fielding
combined breadth and keenness, classical culture and a delicate Gallic
irony to an extent rare among English writers. He lacked the delicate
intuition of Richardson in the analysis of women, nor could he compass
the broad farcical humour of Smollett or the sombre colouring by which
Smollett produces at times such poignant effects of contrast. There was
no poetry in Fielding; but there was practically every other ingredient
of a great prose writer--taste, culture, order, vivacity, humour,
penetrating irony and vivid, pervading common sense, and it is
Fielding's chef-d'oeuvre _Tom Jones_ (1749) that we must regard if not
as the fundament at least as the head of the corner in English prose
fiction. Before _Tom Jones_ appeared, the success of the novel had drawn
a new competitor into the field in Tobias Smollett, the descendant of a
good western lowland family who had knocked about the world and seen
more of its hurlyburly than Fielding himself. In _Roderick Random_
(1748) Smollett represents a rougher and more uncivilized world even
than that depicted in _Joseph Andrews_. The savagery and horse-play
peculiar to these two novelists derives in part from the rogue romance
of Spain (as then recently revived by Lesage), and has a counterpart to
some extent in the graphic art of Hogarth and Rowlandson; yet one cannot
altogether ignore an element of exaggeration which has greatly injured
both these writers in the estimation (and still more in the affection)
of posterity. The genius which struggles through novels such as
_Roderick Random_ and _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ was nearly submerged
under the hard conditions of a general writer during the third quarter
of the 18th century, and it speaks volumes for Smollett's powers of
recuperation that he survived to write two such masterpieces of sardonic
and humorous observation as his _Travels_ and _Humphry Clinker_.
Sterne.
The fourth proto-master of the English novel was the antiquarian
humorist Lawrence Sterne. Though they owed a good deal to _Don Quixote_
and the French novelists, Fielding and Smollett were essentially
observers of life in the quick. Sterne brought a far-fetched style, a
bookish apparatus and a deliberate eccentricity into fiction. _Tristram
Shandy_, produced successively in nine small volumes between 1760 and
1764, is the pretended history of a personage who is not born (before
the fourth volume) and hardly ever appears, carried on in an eccentric
rigmarole of old and new, original and borrowed humour, arranged in a
style well known to students of the later Valois humorists as
_fatrasie_. Far more than Moliere, Sterne took his literary _bien_
wherever he found it. But he invented a kind of tremolo style of his
own, with the aid of which, in conjunction with the most unblushingly
indecent innuendoes, and with a conspicuous genius for humorous
portraiture, trembling upon the verge of the pathetic, he succeeded in
winning a new domain for the art of fiction.
These four great writers then, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and
Sterne--all of them great pessimists in comparison with the benignant
philosophers of a later fiction--first thoroughly fertilized this
important field. Richardson obtained a European fame during his
lifetime. Sterne, as a pioneer impressionist, gave all subsequent
stylists a new handle. Fielding and Smollett grasped the new instrument
more vigorously, and fashioned with it models which, after serving as
patterns to Scott, Marryat, Cooper, Ainsworth, Dickens, Lever,
Stevenson, Merriman, Weyman and other romancists of the 19th century,
have still retained a fair measure of their original popularity
unimpaired.
Johnson.
Apart from the novelists, the middle period of the 18th century is
strong in prose writers: these include Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith,
Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. The last three were all influenced
by the sovereign lucidity of the best French style of the day.
Chesterfield and Walpole were both writers of aristocratic experience
and of European knowledge and sentiment. Johnson alone was a
distinctively English thinker and stylist. His knowledge of the world,
outside England, was derived from books, he was a good deal of a
scholar, an earnest moralist, and something of a divine; his style, at
any rate, reaches back to Taylor, Barrow and South, and has a good deal
of the complex structure, the cadence, and the balance of English and
Latinistic words proper to the 17th century, though the later influence
of Addison and Bolingbroke is also apparent; Johnson himself was fond of
the essay, the satire in verse, and the moral tale (_Rasselas_); but he
lacked the creative imagination indispensable for such work and excelled
chiefly as biographer and critic. For a critic even, it must be admitted
that he was singly deficient in original ideas. He upholds authority. He
judges by what he regards as the accepted rules, derived by Dryden,
Rapin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Rymer, Dennis, Pope and such "estimable
critics" from the ancients, whose decisions on such matters he regards
as paramount. He tries to carry out a systematic, motived criticism; but
he asserts rather than persuades or convinces. We go to his critical
works (_Lives of the Poets_ and _Essay on Shakespeare_) not for their
conclusions, but for their shrewd comments on life, and for an
application to literary problems of a caustic common sense. Johnson's
character and conversation, his knowledge and memory were far more
remarkable than his ideas or his writings, admirable though the best of
these were; the exceptional traits which met in his person and made that
age regard him as a nonpareil have found in James Boswell a delineator
unrivalled in patience, dexterity and dramatic insight. The result has
been a portrait of a man of letters more alive at the present time than
that which any other age or nation has bequeathed to us. In most of his
ideas Johnson was a generation behind the typical academic critics of
his date, Joseph and Thomas Warton, who championed against his authority
what the doctor regarded as the finicking notions of Gray. Both of the
Wartons were enthusiastic for Spenser and the older poetry; they were
saturated with Milton whom they placed far above the correct Mr Pope,
they wrote sonnets (thereby provoking Johnson's ire) and attempted to
revive medieval and Celtic lore in every direction. Johnson's one
attempt at a novel or tale was _Rasselas_, a long "Rambler" essay upon
the vanity of human hope and ambition, something after the manner of the
Oriental tales of which Voltaire had caught the idea from Swift and
Montesquieu; but _Rasselas_ is quite unenlivened by humour, personality
or any other charm.
Goldsmith.
This one quality that Johnson so completely lacked was possessed in its
fullest perfection by Oliver Goldsmith, whose style is the supreme
expression of 18th-century clearness, simplicity and easy graceful
fluency. Much of Goldsmith's material, whether as playwright, story
writer or essayist, is trite and commonplace--his material worked up by
any other hand would be worthless. But, whenever Goldsmith writes about
human life, he seems to pay it a compliment, a relief of fun and good
fellowship accompanies his slightest description, his playful and
delicate touch could transform every thought that he handled into
something radiant with sunlight and fragrant with the perfume of youth.
Goldsmith's plots are Irish, his critical theories are French with a
light top dressing of Johnson and Reynolds or Burke, while his prose
style is an idealization of Addison. His versatility was great, and, in
this and in other respects, he and Johnson are constantly reminding us
that they were hardened professionals, writing against time for money.
Chesterfield and Walpole.
Much of the best prose work of this period, from 1740 to 1780, was done
under very different conditions. The increase of travel, of intercourse
between the nobility of Europe, and of a sense of solidarity,
self-consciousness, leisure and connoisseurship among that section of
English society known as the governing class, or, since Disraeli, as
"the Venetian oligarchy," could hardly fail to produce an increasing
crop of those elaborate collections of letters and memoirs which had
already attained their apogee in France with Mme de Sevigne and the duc
de Saint-Simon. England was not to remain far behind, for in 1718
commence the _Letters_ of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; ten years more saw
the commencement of Lord Hervey's _Memoirs of the Reign of George II._;
and Lord Chesterfield and Lord Orford (better known as Horace Walpole)
both began their inimitable series of _Letters_ about 1740. These
writings, none of them written ostensibly for the press, serve to show
the enormous strides that English prose was making as a medium of
vivacious description. The letters are all the recreation of extensive
knowledge and cosmopolitan acquirements; they are not strong on the
poetic or imaginative side of things, but they have an intense
appreciation of the actual and mundane side of fallible humanity. Lord
Chesterfield's _Letters_ to his son and to his godson are far more, for
they introduce a Ciceronian polish and a Gallic irony and wit into the
hitherto uncultivated garden of the literary graces in English prose.
Chesterfield, whose theme is manners and social amenity, deliberately
seeks a form of expression appropriate to his text--the perfection of
tact, neatness, good order and _savoir faire_. After his grandfather,
the marquess of Halifax, Lord Chesterfield, the synonym in the vulgar
world for a heartless exquisite, is in reality the first fine gentleman
and epicurean in the best sense in English polite literature. Both
Chesterfield and Walpole were conspicuous as raconteurs in an age of
witty talkers, of whose talk R.B. Sheridan, in _The School for Scandal_
(1777), served up a _supreme_. Some of it may be tinsel, but it looks
wonderfully well under the lights. The star comedy of the century
represents the sparkle of this brilliant crowd: it reveals no hearts,
but it shows us every trick of phrase, every eccentricity of manner and
every foible of thought. But the most mundane of the letter writers, the
most frivolous, and also the most pungent, is Horace Walpole, whose
writings are an epitome of the history and biography of the Georgian
era. "Fiddles sing all through them, wax lights, fine dresses, fine
jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle; never was such a
brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us." Yet,
in some ways, he was a corrective to the self-complacency of his
generation, a vast dilettante, lover of "Gothic," of curios and
antiques, of costly printing, of old illuminations and stained glass. In
his short miracle-novel, called _The Castle of Otranto_, he set a
fashion for mystery and terror in fiction, for medieval legend,
diablerie, mystery, horror, antique furniture and Gothic jargon, which
led directly by the route of Anne Radcliffe, Maturin, _Vathek_, _St
Leon_ and _Frankenstein_, to _Queenhoo Hall_, to _Waverley_ and even to
Hugo and Poe.
Fanny Burney. Boswell.
Meanwhile the area of the Memoir was widening rapidly in the hands of
Fanny, the sly daughter of the wordly-wise and fashionable musician, Dr
Burney, author of a novel (_Evelina_) most satirical and facete, written
ere she was well out of her teens; not too kind a satirist of her former
patroness, Mrs Thrale (afterwards Piozzi), the least tiresome of the new
group of scribbling sibyls, blue stockings, lady dilettanti and Della
Cruscans. Both, as portraitists and purveyors of _Johnsoniana_, were
surpassed by the inimitable James Boswell, first and most fatuous of all
interviewers, in brief a biographical genius, with a new recipe,
distinct from Sterne's, for disclosing personality, and a deliberate,
artificial method of revealing himself to us, as it were, unawares.
From all these and many other experiments, a far more flexible prose was
developing in England, adapted for those critical reviews, magazines and
journals which were multiplying rapidly to exploit the new masculine
interest, apart from the schools, in history, topography, natural
philosophy and the picturesque, just as circulating libraries were
springing up to exploit the new feminine passion for fiction, which
together with memoirs and fashionable poetry contributed to give the
booksellers bigger and bigger ideas.
The progress of authorship.
It is surprising how many types of literary productions with which we
are now familiar were first moulded into definite and classical form
during the Johnsonian period. In addition to the novel one need only
mention the economic treatise, as exemplified for the first time in the
admirable symmetry of _The Wealth of Nations_, the diary of a faithful
observer of nature such as Gilbert White, the _Fifteen Discourses_
(1769-1791) in which Sir Joshua Reynolds endeavours for the first time
to expound for England a philosophy of Art, the historico-philosophical
tableau as exemplified by Robertson and Gibbon, the light political
parody of which the poetry of _The Rolliad_ and _Anti-Jacobin_ afford so
many excellent models; and, going to the other extreme, the ponderous
archaeological or topographical monograph, as exemplified in Stuart and
Revett's _Antiquities of Athens_, in Robert Wood's colossal _Ruins of
Palmyra_ (1753), or the monumental _History of Leicestershire_ by John
Nichols. Such works as this last might well seem the outcome of Horace
Walpole's maxim: In this scribbling age "let those who can't write,
glean." In short, the literary landscape in Johnson's day was slowly but
surely assuming the general outlines to which we are all accustomed. The
literary conditions of the period dated from the time of Pope in their
main features, and it is quite possible that they were more considerably
modified in Johnson's own lifetime than they have been since. The
booksellers, or, as they would now be called, publishers, were steadily
superseding the old ties of patronage, and basing their relations with
authors upon a commercial footing. A stage in their progress is marked
by the success of Johnson's friend and Hume's correspondent, William
Strahan, who kept a coach, "a credit to literature." The evolution of a
normal status for the author was aided by the definition of copyright
and gradual extinction of piracy.
Historians.
Histories of their own time by Clarendon and Burnet have been in much
request from their own day to this, and the first, at least, is a fine
monument of English prose; Bolingbroke again, in 1735, dwelt memorably
upon the ethical, political and philosophical value of history. But it
was not until the third quarter of the 18th century that English
literature freed itself from the imputation of lagging hopelessly behind
France, Italy and Germany in the serious work of historical
reconstruction. Hume published the first volume of his _History of
England_ in 1754. Robertson's _History of Scotland_ saw the light in
1759 and his _Charles V._ in 1769; Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_ came in 1776. Hume was, perhaps, the first modernist in
history; he attempted to give his work a modern interest and, Scot
though he was, a modern style--it could not fail, as he knew, to derive
piquancy from its derision of the Whiggish assumption which regarded
1688 as a political millennium. Wm. Robertson was, perhaps, the first
man to adapt the polished periphrases of the pulpit to historical
generalization. The gifts of compromise which he had learned as
Moderator of the General Assembly he brought to bear upon his historical
studies, and a language so unfamiliar to his lips as academic English he
wrote with so much the more care that the greatest connoisseurs of the
day were enthusiastic about "Robertson's wonderful style." Even more
portentous in its superhuman dignity was the style of Edward Gibbon, who
combined with the unspiritual optimism of Hume and Robertson a far more
concentrated devotion to his subject, an industry more monumental, a
greater co-ordinative vigour, and a malice which, even in the 18th
century, rendered him the least credulous man of his age. Of all
histories, therefore, based upon the transmitted evidence of other ages
rather than on the personal observation of the writer's own, Gibbon's
_Decline and Fall_ has hitherto maintained its reputation best. Hume,
even before he was superseded, fell a prey to continuations and
abridgements, while Robertson was supplanted systematically by the
ornate pages of W.H. Prescott.
The increasing transparency of texture in the working English prose
during this period is shown in the writings of theologians such as
Butler and Paley, and of thinkers such as Berkeley and Hume, who, by
prolonging and extending Berkeley's contention that matter was an
abstraction, had shown that mind would have to be considered an
abstraction too, thereby signalling a school of reaction to common sense
or "external reality" represented by Thomas Reid, and with modifications
by David Hartley, Abraham Tucker and others. Butler and Paley are merely
two of the biggest and most characteristic apologists of that day, both
great stylists, though it must be allowed that their very lucidity and
good sense excites almost more doubt than it stills, and both very
successful in repelling the enemy in controversy, though their very
success accentuates the faults of that unspiritual age in which
churchmen were so far more concerned about the title deeds than about
the living portion of the church's estate. Free thought was already
beginning to sap their defences in various directions, and in Tom Paine,
Priestley, Price, Godwin and Mackintosh they found more formidable
adversaries than in the earlier deists. The greatest champion, however,
of continuity and conservation both in church and state, against the new
schools of latitudinarians and radicals, the great eulogist of the
unwritten constitution, and the most perfect master of emotional prose
in this period, prose in which the harmony of sense and sound is
attained to an extent hardly ever seen outside supreme poetry, was
Edmund Burke, one of the most commanding intellects in the whole range
of political letters--a striking contrast in this respect to Junius,
whose mechanical and journalistic talent for invective has a quite
ephemeral value.
Return to nature.
Change in poetic spirit.
Cowper. Blake. Burns.
From 1660 to 1760 the English mind was still much occupied in shaking
off the last traces of feudality. The crown, the parliament, the manor
and the old penal code were left, it is true: but the old tenures and
gild-brotherhoods, the old social habits, miracles, arts, faith,
religion and letters were irrevocably gone. The attempt of the young
Chevalier in 1745 was a complete anachronism, and no sooner was this
generally felt to be so than men began to regret that it should so be.
Men began to describe as "grand" and "picturesque" scenery hitherto
summarized as "barren mountains covered in mist"; while Voltaire and
Pope were at their height, the world began to realize that the Augustan
age, in its zeal for rationality, civism and trim parterres, had
neglected the wild freshness of an age when literature was a wild flower
that grew on the common. Rousseau laid the axe to the root of this
over-sophistication of life; Goldsmith, half understanding, echoed some
of his ideas in "The Deserted Village." Back from books to men was now
the prescription--from the crowded town to the spacious country. From
plains and valleys to peaks and pinewoods. From cities, where men were
rich and corrupt, to the earlier and more primitive moods of earth. The
breath had scarcely left the body of the Grand Monarque before an
intrigue was set on foot to dispute the provisions of his will. So with
the critical testament of Pope. Within a few years of his death we find
Gray, Warton, Hurd and other disciples of the new age denying to Pope
the highest kind of poetic excellence, and exalting imagination and
fancy into a sphere far above the Augustan qualities of correct taste
and good judgment. Decentralization and revolt were the new watchwords
in literature. We must eschew France and Italy and go rather to Iceland
or the Hebrides for fresh poetic emotions: we must shun academies and
classic coffee-houses and go into the street-corners or the hedge-lanes
in search of Volkspoesie. An old muniment chest and a roll of yellow
parchment were the finest incentives to the new spirit of the
picturesque. How else are we to explain the enthusiasm that welcomed the
sham Ossianic poems of James Macpherson in 1760; Percy's patched-up
ballads of 1765 (_Reliques of Ancient Poetry_); the new enthusiasm for
Chaucer; the "black letter" school of Ritson, Tyrrwhitt, George Ellis,
Steevens, Ireland and Malone; above all, the spurious 15th-century poems
poured forth in 1768-1769 with such a wild gusto of archaic imagination
by a prodigy not quite seventeen years of age? Chatterton's precocious
fantasy cast a wonderful spell upon the romantic imagination of other
times. It does not prepare us for the change that was coming over the
poetic spirit of the last two decades of the century, but it does at
least help us to explain it. The great masters of verse in Britain
during this period were the three very disparate figures of William
Cowper, William Blake and Robert Burns. Cowper was not a poet of vivid
and rapturous visions. There is always something of the rusticating
city-scholar about his humour. The ungovernable impulse and imaginative
passion of the great masters of poesy were not his to claim. His motives
to express himself in verse came very largely from the outside. The
greater part, nearly all his best poetry is of the occasional order. To
touch and retouch, he says, in one of his letters--among the most
delightful in English--is the secret of almost all good writing,
especially verse. Whatever is short should be nervous, masculine and
compact. In all the arts that raise the best occasional poetry to the
level of greatness Cowper is supreme. In phrase-moulding, verbal
gymnastic and prosodical marquetry he has scarcely a rival, and the
fruits of his poetic industry are enshrined in the filigree of a most
delicate fancy and a highly cultivated intelligence, purified and thrice
refined in the fire of mental affliction. His work expresses the rapid
civilization of his time, its humanitarian feeling and growing
sensitiveness to natural beauty, home comfort, the claims of animals and
the charms of light literature. In many of his short poems, such as "The
Royal George," artistic simplicity is indistinguishable from the stern
reticence of genius. William Blake had no immediate literary
descendants, for he worked alone, and Lamb was practically alone in
recognizing what he wrote as poetry. But he was by far the most original
of the reactionaries who preceded the Romantic Revival, and he caught
far more of the Elizabethan air in his lyric verse than any one else
before Coleridge. The _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of Experience_, in
1789 and 1794, sing themselves, and have a bird-like spontaneity that
has been the despair of all song-writers from that day to this. After
1800 he winged his flight farther and farther into strange and unknown
regions. In the finest of these earlier lyrics, which owe so little to
his contemporaries, the ripple of the stream of romance that began to
gush forth in 1798 is distinctly heard. But the first poetic genius of
the century was unmistakably Robert Burns. In song and satire alike
Burns is racy, in the highest degree, of the poets of North Britain, who
since Robert Sempill, Willy Hamilton of Gilbertfield, douce Allan
Ramsay, the Edinburgh periwig-maker and miscellanist, and Robert
Fergusson, "the writer-chiel, a deathless name," had kept alive the old
native poetic tradition, had provided the strolling fiddlers with merry
and wanton staves, and had perpetuated the daintiest shreds of national
music, the broadest colloquialisms, and the warmest hues of patriotic
or local sentiment. Burns immortalizes these old staves by means of his
keener vision, his more fiery spirit, his stronger passion and his
richer volume of sound. Burns's fate was a pathetic one. Brief, broken
glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete, his poems
wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, sustained effort,
length of life. Yet occasional, fragmentary, extemporary as most of them
are, they bear the guinea stamp of true genius. His eye is unerring, his
humour of the ripest, his wit both fine and abundant. His ear is less
subtle, except when dialect is concerned. There he is infallible.
Landscape he understands in subordination to life. For abstract ideas
about Liberty and 1789 he cares little. But he is a patriot and an
insurgent, a hater of social distinction and of the rich. Of the divine
right or eternal merit of the system under which the poor man sweats to
put money into the rich man's pocket and fights to keep it there, and is
despised in proportion to the amount of his perspiration, he had a low
opinion. His work has inspired the meek, has made the poor feel
themselves less of ciphers in the world and given courage to the
down-trodden. His love of women has inspired some of the most ardently
beautiful lyrics in the world. Among modern folk-poets such as Jokai and
Mistral, the position of Burns in the hearts of his own people is the
best assured.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--The dearth of literary history in England makes
it rather difficult to obtain a good general view of letters in
Britain during the 18th century. Much may be gleaned, however, from
chapters of Lecky's _History of England during the 18th Century_, from
Stephen's _Lectures on English Literature and Society in the 18th
Century_ (1904), from Taine's _History of English Literature_ (van
Laun's translation), from vols. v. and vi. of Prof. Courthope's
_History of English Poetry_, and from the second volume of Chambers's
_Cyclopaedia of English Literature_ (1902). The two vols. dealing
respectively with the _Age of Pope_ and the _Age of Johnson_ in Bell's
Handbooks of English Literature will be found useful, and suggestive
chapters will be found in Saintsbury's _Short History_ and in A.H.
Thompson's _Student's History of English Literature_ (1901). The same
may, perhaps, be said of books v. and vi. in the _Bookman Illustrated
History of English Literature_ (1906), by the present writer.
Sidelights of value are to be found in Walter Raleigh's little book on
the _English Novel_, in Beljame's _Le Publique et les hommes de
lettres en Angleterre au XVIII^e siecle_, in H.A. Beers' _History of
English Romanticism in the 18th Century_ (1899), and above all in Sir
Leslie Stephen's _History of English Thought during the 18th Century_;
Stephen's _Hours in a Library_, the monographs dealing with the period
in the English Men of Letters series, the Vignettes and Portraits of
Austin Dobson and George Paston, Elwin's _Eighteenth Century Men of
Letters_, and Thomas Wright's _Caricature History of the Georges_,
must also be kept in mind. (T. Se.)