The same critical spirit was also whetted in the fields of science and speculation, which the war and the Puritan rule had not encouraged. The activities of the newly-founded Royal Society told directly upon literature, andScience and Letters.counted powerfully in the organization of a clear, uniform prose—the “close, naked, natural way of speaking,” which the historian of the Society, Sprat, cites aspart of its programme. And the style of Sprat, as of scientific masters like Newton and Ray the botanist, itself attests the change. A time of profound and peaceful and fruitful scientific labour began; the whole of Newton’sPrincipiaappeared in 1687; the dream of Bacon came nearer, and England was less isolated from the international work of knowledge. The spirit of method and observation and induction spread over the whole field of thought and was typified in John Locke, whoseEssay concerning Human Understandingcame out in English in 1690, and who applied the same deeply sagacious and cautious calculus to education and religion and the “conduct of the understanding.” But his works, though their often mellow and dignified style has been ignorantly underrated, also show the change in philosophic writing since Hobbes. The old grandeur and pugnacity are gone; the imaginative play of science, or quasi-science, on the literature of reflection is gone; the eccentrics, the fantasts, the dreamers are gone, or only survive in curious transitional writers like Joseph Glanvil (Scepsis scientifica, 1665) or Thomas Burnet (Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684). This change was in part a conscious and an angry change, as is clear from the attacks made in Samuel Butler’sHudibras(1663-1668) upon scholastic verbiage, astrology, fanatical sects and their disputes, poetic and “heroic” enthusiasm and intellectual whim.
Before the Restoration men of letters, with signal exceptions like Milton and Marvell, had been Cavalier, courtly and Anglican in their sympathies. The Civil War had scattered them away from the capital, which, despite Milton’s dreamCourtly and social influence.inAreopagiticaof its humming and surging energies, had ceased to be, what it now again became, the natural haunt and Rialto of authors. The taste of the new king and court served to rally them. Charles II. relishedHudibras, used and pensioned Dryden, sat under Barrow and South and heard them with appreciation, countenanced science, visited comedies, and held his own in talk by mother-wit. Letters became the pastime, and therefore one of the more serious pursuits, of men of quality, who soon excelled in song and light scarifying verse and comedy, and took their own tragedies and criticisms gravely. Poetry under such auspices became gallant and social, and also personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most vital form, with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular argumentation and elegy. The social and conversational instinct was the master-influence in prose. It produced a subtle but fundamental change in the attitude of author to reader. Prose came nearer to living speech, it became more civil and natural and persuasive, and this not least in the pulpit. The sense of ennui, or boredom, which seemed as unknown in the earlier part of the century as it is to the modern German, became strongly developed, and prose was much improved by the fear of provoking it. In all these ways the Restoration accompanied and quickened a speedier and greater change in letters than any political event in English history since the reign of Alfred, when prose itself was created.
The formal change in prose can thus be assigned to no one writer, for the good reason that it presupposes a change of spoken style lying deeper than any personal influence. If we begin with the writing that is nearest livingProse and criticism.talk—the letters of Otway or Lady Rachel Russell, or the diary of Pepys (1659-1669)—that supreme disclosure of our mother-earth—or the evidence in a state trial, or the dialogue in the more natural comedies; if we then work upwards through some of the plainer kinds of authorship, like the less slangy of L’Estrange’s pamphlets, or Burnet’sHistory of My Own Time, a solid Whig memoir of historical value, until we reach really admirable or lasting prose like Dryden’sPrefaceto hisFables(1700), or the maxims of Halifax;—if we do this, we are aware, amid all varieties, survivals and reversions, of a strong and rapid drift towards the style that we call modern. And one sign of this movement is the revulsion against any over-saturating of the working, daily language, and even of the language of appeal and eloquence, with the Latin element. In Barrow and Glanvil, descendants of Taylor and Browne, many Latinized words remain, which were soon expelled from style like foreign bodies from an organism. As in the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, the process is visible by which the Latin vocabulary and Latin complication of sentence first gathers strength, and then, though not without leaving its traces, is forced to ebb. The instinct of the best writers secured this result, and secured it for good and all. In Dryden’s diction there is a nearly perfect balance and harmony of learned and native constituents, and a sensitive tact in Gallicizing; in his build of sentence there is the same balance between curtness or bareness and complexity or ungainly lengthiness. For ceremony and compliment he keeps a rolling period, for invective a short sharp stroke without the gloves. And he not only uses in general a sentence of moderate scale, inclining to brevity, but he finds out its harmonies; he is a seeming-careless but an absolute master of rhythm. In delusive ease he is unexcelled; and we only regret that he could not have written prose oftener instead of plays. We should thus, however, have lost their prefaces, in which the bulk and the best of Dryden’s criticisms appear. From theEssay of Dramatic Poesy(1668) down to thePreface to Fables(1700) runs a series of essays:On the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,On Heroic Plays,On Translated Verse,On Satireand many more; which form the first connected body of criticisms in the language, and are nobly written always. Dryden’s prose is literature as it stands, and yet is talk, and yet again is mysteriously better than talk. The critical writings of John Dennis are but a sincere application of the rules and canons that were now becoming conventional; Rymer, though not so despicable as Macaulay said, is still more depressing than Dennis; and for any critic at once so free, so generous and so sure as Dryden we wait in vain for a century.
Three or four names are usually associated with Dryden’s in the work of reforming or modifying prose: Sprat, Tillotson, Sir William Temple, and George Savile, marquis of Halifax; but the honours rest with Halifax. Sprat,Contributors to the new prose.though clear and easy, has little range; Tillotson, though lucid, orderly, and a very popular preacher, has little distinction; Temple, the elegant essayist, has a kind of barren gloss and fine literary manners, but very little to say. The political tracts, essays and maxims of Halifax (died 1695) are the most typically modern prose between Dryden and Swift, and are nearer than anything else to the best French writing of the same order, in their finality of epigram, their neatness and mannerliness and sharpness. TheCharacter of a TrimmerandAdvice to a Daughterare the best examples.
Religious literature, Anglican and Puritan, is the chief remaining department to be named. The strong, eloquent and coloured preaching of Isaac Barrow the mathematician, who died in 1677, is a survival of the larger and olderPreachers.manner of the Church. In its balance of logic, learning and emotion, in its command alike of Latin splendour and native force, it deserves a recognition it has lost. Another athlete of the pulpit, Robert South, who is so often praised for his wit that his force is forgotten, continues the lineage, while Tillotson and the elder Sherlock show the tendency to the smoother and more level prose. But the revulsion against strangeness and fancy and magnificence went too far; it made for a temporary bareness and meanness and disharmony, which had to be checked by Addison, Bolingbroke and Berkeley. From what Addison saved our daily written English, may be seen in the vigorous slangy hackwork of Roger L’Estrange, the translator and pamphleteer, in the news-sheets of Dunton, and in the satires of Tom Brown. These writers were debasing the coinage with their street journalism.
Another and far nobler variety of vernacular prose is found in the Puritans. Baxter and Howe, Fox and Bunyan, had the English Bible behind them, which gave them the best of their inspiration, though the first two of them werePuritan prose.also erudite men. Richard Baxter, an immensely fertile writer, is best remembered by those of his own fold for hisSaint’s Everlasting Rest(1650) and his autobiography, John Howe for his evangelical apologiaThe Living Temple of God(1675), Fox for hisJournaland its mixture of quaintness and rapturous mysticism. John Bunyan, the least instructed of them all, is their only born artist. His creed and pointBunyan.of view were those of half the nation—the half that was usually inarticulate in literature, or spoke without style or genius. His reading, consisting not only of the Bible, but of the popular allegories of giants, pilgrims and adventure, was also that of his class.The Pilgrim’s Progress, of which the first part appeared in 1678, the second in 1684, is the happy flowering sport amidst a growth of barren plants of the same tribe. TheProgressis a dream, more vivid to its author than most men’s waking memories to themselves; the emblem and the thing signified are merged at every point, so that Christian’s journey is not so much an allegory with a key as a spiritual vision of this earth and our neighbours.Grace Abounding, Bunyan’s diary of his own voyage to salvation,The Holy War, an overloaded fable of the fall and recovery of mankind, andThe Life and Death of Mr Badman, a novel telling of the triumphal earthly progress of a scoundrelly tradesman, are among Bunyan’s other contributions to literature. His union of spiritual intensity, sharp humorous vision, and power of simple speech consummately chosen, mark his work off alike from his own inarticulate public and from all other literary performance of his time.
The transition from the older to the newer poetry was not abrupt. Old themes and tunes were slowly disused, others previously of lesser mark rose into favour, and a few quite fresh ones were introduced. The poems of JohnTransitional verse.Oldham and Andrew Marvell belong to both periods. Both of them begin with fantasy and elegy, and end with satires, which indeed are rather documents than works of art. The monody of Oldham on his friend Morwent is poorly exchanged for theSatires on the Jesuits(1681), and the lovely metaphysical verses of Marvell on gardens and orchards and the spiritual love sadly give place to hisLast Instructions to a Painter(1669). In hisHoratian OdeMarvell had nobly and impartially applied his earlier style to national affairs; but the time proved too strong for this delightful poet. Another and aHudibras.stranger satire had soon greeted the Restoration, theHudibras(1663-1678) of Samuel Butler, with its companion pieces. The returned wanderers delighted in this horribly agile, boisterous and fierce attack on the popular party and its religions, and its wrangles and its manners. Profoundly eccentric and tiresomely allusive in his form, and working in the short rhyming couplets thenceforth called “Hudibrastics,” Butler founded a small and peculiar but long-lived school of satire. The other verse of the time is largely satire of a different tone and metre; but the earlier kind of finished and gallant lyric persisted through the reign of Charles II. The songs of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, are usually malicious, sometimesSongsters.passionate; they have a music and a splendid self-abandonment such as we never meet again till Burns. Sedley and Dorset and Aphra Behn and Dryden are the rightful heirs of Carew and Lovelace, those infallible masters of short rhythms; and this secret also was lost for a century afterwards.
In poetry, in prose, and to some extent in drama, John Dryden, the creature of his time, is the master of its expression. He began with panegyric verse, first on Cromwell and then on Charles, which is full of fine things and false writing.Dryden.TheAnnus Mirabilis(1667) is the chief example, celebrating the Plague, the Fire and the naval victory, in the quatrains for which Davenant’s pompousGondiberthad shown the way. TheEssay on Dramatic Poesy(1668), a dialogue on the rivalries of blank verse with rhyme, and of the Elizabethan drama with the French, is perfect modern prose; and to this perfection Dryden attained at a bound, while he attained his poetical style more gradually. He practised his couplet in panegyric, in heroic tragedy, and in dramatic prologue and epilogue for twenty years before it was consummate. Till 1680 he supported himself chiefly by his plays, which have not lived so long as their critical prefaces, already mentioned. His diction and versification came to their full power in his satires, rhymed arguments, dedications and translations.Absalom and Achitophel(part i., 1681; part ii., with Nahum Tate, 1682), as well asThe MedalandMac Flecknoe, marked a new birth of English satire, placing it at once on a level with that of any ancient or modern country. The mixture of deadly good temper, Olympian unfairness, and rhetorical and metrical skill in each of these poems has never been repeated. The presentment of Achitophel, earl of Shaftesbury, in his relations with Absalom Walters and Charles the minstrel-king of Judah, as well as the portraits of Shimei and Barzillai and Jotham, the eminent Whigs and Tories, and of the poets Og and Doeg, are things whose vividness age has never discoloured. Dryden’s Protestant arguings inReligio Laici(1682) and his equally sincere Papistical arguings inThe Hind and the Panther(1687) are just as skilful. His translations of Virgil and parts of Lucretius, of Chaucer and Boccaccio (Fables, 1700), set the seal on his command of his favourite couplet for the higher kinds of appeal and oratory. HisOdeon Anne Killigrew, and his popular but coarserAlexander’s Feast, have a more lyric harmony; and his songs, inserted in his plays, reflect the change of fashion by their metrical adeptness and often thorough-going wantonness. The epithet of “glorious,” in its older sense of a certain conscious and warranted pride of place, not in that of boastful or pretentious, suits Dryden well. Not only did he leave a model and a point of departure for Pope, but his influence recurs in Churchill, in Gray, in Johnson and in Crabbe, where he is seen counteracting, with his large, wholesome and sincere bluntness, the acidity of Pope. Dryden was counted near Shakespeare and Milton until the romantic revival renewed the sense of proportion; but the same sense now demands his acknowledgment as the English poet who is nearest to their frontiers of all those who are exiled from their kingdom.
Restoration and Revolution tragedy is nearly all abortive; it is now hard to read it for pleasure. But it has noble flights, and its historic interest is high. Two of its species, the rhymed heroic play and the rehandling of ShakespeareTragedy.in blank verse, were also brought to their utmost by Dryden, though in both he had many companions. The heroic tragedies were a hybrid offspring of the heroic romance and French tragedy; and thoughThe Conquest of Granada(1669-1670) andTyrannic Lovewould be very open to satire in Dryden’s own vein, they are at least generously absurd. Their intention is never ignoble, if often impossible. After a time Dryden went back to Shakespeare, after a fashion already set by Sir William Davenant, the connecting link with the older tragedy and the inaugurator of the new. They “revived” Shakespeare; they vamped him in a style that did not wholly perish till after the time of Garrick.The Tempest,Troilus and Cressida, andAntony and Cleopatrawere thus handled by Dryden; and the last of these, as converted by him intoAll for Love(1678), is loftier and stronger than any of his original plays, its blank verse renewing the ties of Restoration poetry with the great age. The heroic plays, written in one or other metre, lived long, and expired in the burlesques of Fielding and Sheridan.The Rehearsal(1671), a gracious piece of fooling partially aimed at Dryden by Buckingham and his friends, did not suffice to kill its victims. Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, both of whom generally used blank verse, are the other tragic writers of note, children indeed of the extreme old age of the drama. Otway’sOtway.long-actedVenice Preserved(1682) has an almost Shakespearian skill in melodrama, a wonderful tide of passionate language, and a blunt and bold delineation of character; but Otway’s inferior style and verse could only be admired in an age like his own. Lee is far more of a poet, though less of a dramatist, and he wasted a certain talent in noise and fury.
Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden’s many comediesComedy.often show his more boisterous and blatant, rarely his finer qualities. Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and vulgarizes Molière without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored inhis fops the gaiety and insolence of the world he knew. The society depicted by William Wycherley, the one comic dramatist of power between Massinger and Congreve, at firstWycherley.seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic reckless exhibition of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges in the most callous good spirits and with careful cynicism.The Plain Dealer(1677), a skilful transplantation, as well as a depravation of Molière’sLe Misanthrope, is his best piece: he writes in prose, and his prose is excellent, modern and lifelike.
Bibliography.—General Histories: Hallam,Introduction to the Lit. of Europe(1838-1839); G. Saintsbury,Elizabethan Literature(1890), andHistory of Literary Criticism, vol. ii. (1902); W.J. Courthorpe,History of English Poetry, vols. i.-v. (1895-1905); J.J. Jusserand,Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais, vol. ii. (1904); T. Seccombe and J.W. Allen,The Age of Shakespeare(2 vols., 1903); D. Hannay,The Later Renaissance(1898); H.J.C. Grierson,First Half of 17th Century; O. Elton,The Augustan Ages(1899); Masson,Life of Milton(6 vols., London, 1881-1894); R. Garnett,The Age of Dryden(1901); W. Raleigh,The English Novel(1894); J.J. Jusserand,Le Roman anglais au temps de Shakespeare(1887, Eng. tr., 1901); G. Gregory Smith,Elizabethan Critical Essays(2 vols., 1904, reprints and introd.). Classical and Foreign Influences.—Mary A. Scott,Elizabethan Translations from the Italian(bibliography), (Baltimore, 1895); E. Koeppel,Studien zur Gesch. der ital. Novelle i. d. eng. Litteratur des 16ten Jahrh.(Strasb., 1892); L. EinsteinThe Italian Renaissance in England(New York, 1902); J. Erskine,The Elizabethan Lyric(New York, 1903); J.S. Harrison,Platonism in Eliz. Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries(New York, 1903); S. Lee,Elizabethan Sonnets(2 vols., 1904); C.H. Herford,Literary Relations of England and Germany in 16th Century; J.G. Underhill,Spanish Lit. in the England of the Tudors(New York, 1899); J.E. Spingarn,Hist. of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance(New York, 1899). Many articles inEnglische Studien,Anglia, &c., on influences, texts and sources. See too arts.Drama;Sonnet;Renaissance.
Bibliography.—General Histories: Hallam,Introduction to the Lit. of Europe(1838-1839); G. Saintsbury,Elizabethan Literature(1890), andHistory of Literary Criticism, vol. ii. (1902); W.J. Courthorpe,History of English Poetry, vols. i.-v. (1895-1905); J.J. Jusserand,Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais, vol. ii. (1904); T. Seccombe and J.W. Allen,The Age of Shakespeare(2 vols., 1903); D. Hannay,The Later Renaissance(1898); H.J.C. Grierson,First Half of 17th Century; O. Elton,The Augustan Ages(1899); Masson,Life of Milton(6 vols., London, 1881-1894); R. Garnett,The Age of Dryden(1901); W. Raleigh,The English Novel(1894); J.J. Jusserand,Le Roman anglais au temps de Shakespeare(1887, Eng. tr., 1901); G. Gregory Smith,Elizabethan Critical Essays(2 vols., 1904, reprints and introd.). Classical and Foreign Influences.—Mary A. Scott,Elizabethan Translations from the Italian(bibliography), (Baltimore, 1895); E. Koeppel,Studien zur Gesch. der ital. Novelle i. d. eng. Litteratur des 16ten Jahrh.(Strasb., 1892); L. EinsteinThe Italian Renaissance in England(New York, 1902); J. Erskine,The Elizabethan Lyric(New York, 1903); J.S. Harrison,Platonism in Eliz. Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries(New York, 1903); S. Lee,Elizabethan Sonnets(2 vols., 1904); C.H. Herford,Literary Relations of England and Germany in 16th Century; J.G. Underhill,Spanish Lit. in the England of the Tudors(New York, 1899); J.E. Spingarn,Hist. of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance(New York, 1899). Many articles inEnglische Studien,Anglia, &c., on influences, texts and sources. See too arts.Drama;Sonnet;Renaissance.
(O. E.*)
V. The 18th Century
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 consequentlySocial changes.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 début 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.
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,Locke; Addison.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 theHuman 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 theSpectator.
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 theTatlerof 1709-1710 whoSteele.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 theSpectatorsucceeded theTatlerin 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 makeup 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.
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 countrySwift.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 theJournal to Stellahe 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 isArbuthnot.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 (inThe Fable of the Beesof 1723) against the genteel optimism of theCharacteristicsof Lord Shaftesbury. Neither the matter nor the manner of the brilliantBolingbroke.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.
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 theDefoe.very hungry and the very mean. From reporting sensations and chroniclingfaits divers, Defoe worked his way almost insensibly to the Spanish tale of the old Mendoza or picaresque pattern.Robinson Crusoewas 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 naïvetés 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.
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 theSatiresandEpistles, which are largely of thePope.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. TheWinterThomson.(1726) of James Thomson may be regarded as inaugurating a new era in English poetry. Lady Winchilsea, John Philips, author ofCyder, and John Dyer, whoseGrongar Hillwas published a few months beforeWinter, 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,Collins. Gray.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 ofThe 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 ofthe 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 tosing(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 romanticéclosionwhich blossomed inChristabel. 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 hisElegy, 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 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-novelistsThe novel.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 ofMorte d’Arthur. Such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic; the new centos of tales of chivalry like theSeven 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’sLife 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 theTatlerandSpectatorwere already found the methods and subjects of the modern novel. The De Coverley papers in theSpectator, 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 Abbé Prevost.Richardson.Samuel Richardson (1689-1762), therefore, when he produced the first two modern novels of European fame inPamela(1740) andClarissa(1748), inherited far more than he invented. There had been Richardsonians before Richardson.Clarissais 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.
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 rancidFielding.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, norSmollett.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’œuvreTom Jones(1749) that we must regard if not as the fundament at least as the head of the corner in English prose fiction. BeforeTom Jonesappeared, 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. InRoderick Random(1748) Smollett represents a rougher and more uncivilized world even than that depicted inJoseph 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 asRoderick RandomandFerdinand Count Fathomwas 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 hisTravelsandHumphry Clinker.
The fourth proto-master of the English novel was the antiquarian humorist Lawrence Sterne. Though they owed agood deal toDon Quixoteand the French novelists, Fielding and Smollett were essentially observers of life in the quick.Sterne.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 asfatrasie. Far more than Molière, Sterne took his literarybienwherever 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.
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 sovereignJohnson.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 PoetsandEssay 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 wasRasselas, 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; butRasselasis quite unenlivened by humour, personality or any other charm.
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 ofGoldsmith.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.
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 Sévigné and the duc de Saint-Simon. England was not to remain far behind, for in 1718 commence theLettersof Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; ten years more saw the commencement of Lord Hervey’sMemoirs of the Reign of George II.; and Lord Chesterfield and Lord OrfordChesterfield and Walpole.(better known as Horace Walpole) both began their inimitable series ofLettersabout 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’sLettersto 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 andsavoir 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, inThe School for Scandal(1777), served up asuprême. 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,calledThe 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 LeonandFrankenstein, toQueenhoo Hall, toWaverleyand even to Hugo and Poe.
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 wasFanny Burney. Boswell.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 ofJohnsoniana, 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.
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 theThe progress of authorship.economic treatise, as exemplified for the first time in the admirable symmetry ofThe Wealth of Nations, the diary of a faithful observer of nature such as Gilbert White, theFifteen 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 ofThe RolliadandAnti-Jacobinafford so many excellent models; and, going to the other extreme, the ponderous archaeological or topographical monograph, as exemplified in Stuart and Revett’sAntiquities of Athens, in Robert Wood’s colossalRuins of Palmyra(1753), or the monumentalHistory of Leicestershireby 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.
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,Historians.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 hisHistory of Englandin 1754. Robertson’sHistory of Scotlandsaw the light in 1759 and hisCharles V.in 1769; Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empirecame 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, whocombinedwith 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’sDecline and Fallhas 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.
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,Return to nature.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 chestChange in poetic spirit.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 allCowper. Blake. Burns.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. TheSongs of InnocenceandSongs 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 Jókai and Mistral, the position of Burns in the hearts of his own people is the best assured.