The cringing subserviency of political men was equal to their corruption. When George I died, and it was believed that Sir Spencer Compton would succeed to the power of Sir Robert Walpole, at the king's reception "Sir Robert walked through these rooms as if they had been still empty; his presence, that used to make a crowd wherever he appeared, now emptied every corner he turned to, and the same people who were officiously a week ago clearing the way to flatter his prosperity, were now getting out of it to avoid sharing his disgrace. Everybody looked upon it as sure, and whatever profession of adherence and gratitude for former favors were made him in private, there were none among the many his power had obliged (excepting General Churchill and Lord Hervey) who did not in public as notoriously decline and fear his notice, as they used industriously to seek and covet it."[107] On the same occasion, Horace Walpole tells us, "my mother * * * could not make her way (to pay her respects to the king and queen) between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor could approach nearer to the queen than the third or fourth row; but no sooner was she descried by her Majesty, than the queen cried aloud, 'There I am sure I see a friend!' The torrent divided and shrunk to either side: 'and as I came away,' said my mother, 'I might have walked over their heads if I had pleased.'"[108] The general corruption and wickedness produced a remarkable misanthropy in the minds of men, which is reflected in the savage satire of Swift, in the bitter invective of Junius, in the cynicism of Lord Hervey. Sir Robert Walpole, said the latter, "had more warmth of affection and friendship for some particular people than one could have believed it possible for any one who had been so long raking in the dirt of mankind to be capable of feeling for so worthless a species of animals. One should naturally have imagined that the contempt and distrust he must have had for the species in gross, would have given him at least an indifference and distrust toward every particular."[109]
The mercenary character of Parliament allowed the first two Georges to have much their own way as long as the money held out. Liberty of the subject, if not in great danger, had certainly lost its natural guardian. Few seats depended on a direct and popular vote. Most of them were in the gift of noblemen or rich commoners, "rotten boroughs," having only "the bare name of a town, of which there remains not so much as the ruins."[110] Defoe tells us that the market price of a seat was a thousand guineas. The object of the purchaser was less often the service of his country, or even an honorable ambition, than the profit to be made from the sale of his vote. Members not infrequently had regular salaries from the government. "Sir Robert Walpole and the queen both told me separately," wrote Lord Hervey, "that it (the victory of the court) cost the king but 900l.—500l. to one man, and 400l. to another; and that even those two sums were advanced to two men who were to have received them at the end of the session had this question never been moved, and who only took this opportunity to solicit prompt payment."[111] Lord Chesterfield, in the same letter in which he spoke of the corrupt influencing of elections as a high crime and misdemeanor, recommends the Earl of Marchmont to bribe "some of your venal peers" to confess that they took money to vote for the court.[112] "Ever since Lord Granville went out," wrote Horace Walpole in 1744, "all has been in suspense. The leaders of the Opposition immediately imposed silence upon their party; everything passed without the least debate, in short, all were making their bargains. One has heard of the corruption of courtiers, but, believe me the impudent prostitution of patriots, going to market with their honesty, beats it to nothing. Do but think of two hundred men of the most consummate virtue, setting themselves to sale for three weeks!"[113] The corruption of Parliament and the indifference, of members to any interests other than their own, were pointedly expressed by Queen Caroline in her reply to an address by Lord Stair[114]:—"I must, therefore, once more ask you, my Lord, how you can have the assurance to talk to me of your thinking the sense of constituents, their interests, or their instructions any measure or rule for the conduct of their representatives in Parliament. * * * To talk, therefore, in the patriot strain you have done to me on this occasion, can move me, my Lord, to nothing but laughter."
In the words of Mr. Lecky,[115] the government was "corrupt, inefficient, and unheroic, but it was free from the gross vices of continental administrations; it was moderate tolerant, and economical; it was, with all its faults, a free government, and it contained in itself the elements of reformation." The national industry and resolution, particularly in the middle classes, brought about a great increase of wealth, a remarkable development of manufactures and commerce, which gave the country the extraordinary prosperity which it has since, almost without a check, enjoyed. The external appearance of England presented a new aspect. A fourth part of the whole land was redeemed from waste and put under cultivation.[116] The advance in agriculture and manufactures, making necessary better means of communication, introduced canals and substituted fine highways for the old muddy, robber-infested roads. The condition of these as late as 1736 may be inferred from that of the road between Kensington and London: "The road between this place and London is grown so infamously bad, that we live here in the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us there is between them and us a great, impassable gulf of mud. There are two roads through the Park, but the new one is so convex and the old one so concave, that by this extreme of faults they agree in the common one of being, like the high-road, impassable."[117]
Social life was marked by the same corruption, by the same absence of high aspirations and standards which we have seen in politics. The nation, especially the higher ranks, had not recovered from the license of the Restoration, while the agencies which can preserve virtue and refinement in a society were almost inactive. Religion, partly in consequence of the reaction which followed the civil wars, and partly in consequence of the spread of rational tendencies, had lost its hold on society, and no longer sufficed to keep it in check. Theological controversy, although it issue in narrowness and persecution, yet has the merit of keeping alive an appreciation of high moral qualities and aims. In the absence of strong religious feeling, there is yet in the human mind a natural preference for what is beautiful and honorable, usually taking the form of ideals, which may keep up a social tone. This may be seen in the age of Elizabeth, not a very religious period, but one in which poetry and elevation of thought overshadow coarseness and immorality. The nineteenth century, again, is neither marked by strong religious feelings nor by any great tendency to idealization. And yet the nineteenth century has its standard, firmly based on public opinion, made up of a respect for decency and justice, a love of refinement, and an appreciation of the expediency as well as the attractiveness of virtue; a standard which influences many minds over which religion has little control. But in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, religion had ceased to govern, and had not yet attained that moral influence which, even in the absence of strong faith, establishes rectitude of conduct, philanthropy, and purity of thought in the minds of men. The ideals and aspirations of preceding centuries had no meaning for what Addison called an "understanding age," and the standard of order, refinement and taste of the present had yet to come. The low state of society was realized and revolted against by the best minds of the time. Gay lampooned it in the "Beggars' Opera," Swift satirized it in "Gulliver's Travels," Defoe became by force of circumstances a moral teacher; Addison, Steele, all the essayists preached lay sermons; the novelists set out with the object, less to amuse than to instruct, to improve their readers. This tendency, so marked in the literature of the time, is the evidence of the reforming influences at work. But many years passed before their effect was perceptible.
There is nothing attractive about George the First and his two ugly old mistresses, the "Elephant" and the "Maypole"; nor about his court of Germans, utilizing their time in England by accumulating money to carry back to Hanover when the harvest time had passed. George the Second, brave, but narrow and ill-tempered, embodied in himself the coarseness of the time. He loved his wife, who was faithful to him through every outrage and every neglect. He caused one side to be taken out of her coffin, so that when he should be laid beside her his dust might mingle with hers. He esteemed her so highly, that in his grief at losing her, he went so far as to say that if she had not been his wife, he would have wished her for a mistress. To this wife, whom, in his own way, he sincerely loved and sincerely mourned, he confided all the details of his amours with other women. From Hanover, where he was acquiring Madame Walmoden as his mistress, "he acquainted the queen by letter of every step he took—of the growth of his passion, the progress of his applications, and their success, of every word as well as every action that passed—so minute a description of her person that, had the queen been a painter, she might have drawn her rival's picture at six hundred miles' distance. He added, too, the account of his buying her, and what he gave her, which, considering the rank of the purchaser, and the merits of the purchase as he set them forth, I think he had no great reason to brag of, when the first price, according to his report, was only one thousand ducats—a much greater proof of his economy than his passion."[118] Among many extraordinary relations and expressions his letters contained, "there was one in which he desired the queen to contrive, if she could, that the Prince of Modena, who was to come the latter end of the year to England, might bring his wife with him; and the reason he gave for it was, that he heard her Highness was pretty free of her person, and that he had the greatest inclination imaginable to pay his addresses to a daughter of the late Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans—'un plaisir' (for he always wrote in French), 'que je suis sur, ma chère Caroline, vous serez bien aise de me procurer, quand je vous dis combien je le souhaite.' Such a request to his wife respecting a woman he never saw, and during his connection with Madame Walmoden, speaks much stronger in a bare narrative of the fact, than by any comment or reflections; and is as incapable of being heightened as difficult to be credited."[119]
Queen Caroline bore all this without a murmur in order to retain her political influence with the king. To the power of the queen she sacrificed the feelings of the woman. With many good qualities and considerable ability, she shared in the prevailing coarseness. Her son, the Prince of Wales, was a very disagreeable person. Neither the queen nor the Princess Caroline "made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy—the queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the Princess Caroline declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe; and reproaching Lord Hervey" for ever having believed "the nauseous beast (those were her words) cared for anybody but his own nauseous self."[120] The morning after the prince had been ordered to leave the palace, "the queen, at breakfast, every now and then repeated, 'I hope, in God, I shall never see him again'; and the king, among many other paternal douceurs in his valediction to his son, said,'Thank-God, to-morrow night the puppy will be out of my house.'"[121] "My dear Lord" said the queen to Hervey, "I will give it to you under my own hand, if you are in any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it."[122] After the royal family, Sir Robert Walpole was the most prominent person in the country. He went about publicly with his mistress, and entertained his friends at his country-seat with orgies which disturbed the whole neighborhood. When the queen died he urged the princesses to get their father some new mistress to distract him. Lord Hervey says that Lady Sundon "had sense enough to perceive what black and dirty company, by living in a court, she was forced to keep."[123] Lady Deloraine, who was suspected of being the king's mistress, "when she spoke seriously to Sir Robert Walpole, pretended not to have yet yielded; and said 'she was not of an age like a vain or a loving fool, but that if she did consent, that she would be well paid.'"[124] "She told Lady Sundon, with whom she was very little acquainted, that the king had been very importunate these two years; and had often told her how unkind she was to refuse him; that it was mere crossness, for that he was sure her husband would not take it at all ill."[125] The looseness of the marriage tie had been a prevailing evil ever since the Restoration. Steele wrote in the Tatler in 1710: "The wits of this island for above fifty years past, instead of correcting the vices of the age, have done all they could to inflame them. Marriage has been one of the common topics of ridicule that every stage scribbler hath found his account in; for whenever there is an occasion for a clap, an impertinent jest upon matrimony is sure to raise it. This hath been attended with very pernicious consequences. Many a country squire, upon his setting up for a man of the town, has gone home in the gaiety of his heart and beat his wife. A kind husband hath been looked upon as a clown, and a good wife as a domestic annual unfit for the company or conversation of the beau monde. In short, separate beds, silent tables, and solitary homes have been introduced by your men of wit and pleasure of the age."[126]
The prevailing immorality and coarseness were in keeping with the absence of sympathy with all elevation of thought and sentiment. "If a man of any delicacy were to attend the discourses of the young fellows of this age," wrote Steele, "he would believe that there were none but prostitutes to make the objects of passion."[127] "Every woman is at heart a rake," thought Pope. Women were generally treated with disrespect, and distinctively female virtues were almost without appreciation. It is instructive to contrast the deeds of arms done in honor of a mistress in the Middle Ages, and the elevated sentiments held regarding women in what Addison called a "barbarous age," with the actions by which young men sometimes showed their devotion in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The latter were as extravagant as the former, but extravagant after how different a manner. One young fellow, distinguished himself by drinking wine strained through his mistress' chemise; another, by drinking out of her shoe; another, by having her slipper torn to shreds, cooked, and served up as a dish. Coarseness of thought naturally brought on coarseness of action. Horace Walpole wrote in 1737, "'Tis no little inducement, to make me wish myself in France, that I hear gallantry is not left off there; that you may be polite, and not be thought awkward for it. You know the pretty men of the age in England use the women with no more deference than they do their coach horses, and have not half the regard for them that they have for themselves."[128]
Against the grosser faults of immorality and indecency Steele and Addison preached. But even they were insensible to an elevated view of the relations between men and women. Such a view was, however, taken by Defoe; a man whom Steele and Addison, as well as the polite world in general, looked upon as an adventurer, and one whose opinions on social subjects they disdained. "We reproach the sex every day," wrote Defoe, "with folly and impertinence, while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves. * * * I cannot think that God ever made them so delicate, so glorious creatures, and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind, with souls capable of the same enjoyments as men, and all to be only stewards of our houses, cooks, and slaves."[129] Defoe stands almost alone in his remonstrance against the neglect of female education. But he stands more isolated still in his appreciation of womanly virtues, and in the enthusiasm with which he could speak of them. "A woman well-bred and well-taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behavior, is a creature without comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments; she is all softness and sweetness, love, wit, and delight; she is every way suitable to the sublimest wish; and the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her and be thankful."[130]
Love was hardly distinguished from mere animal desire. The poets wrote of it coldly and conventionally, as of a thing which existed only in name. The lover could only beg his mistress "to ease his pain." But the conventionality which extended through all thoughts and expressions relating to the higher emotions of the human soul, had no effect in diminishing the coarseness of thought and conversation. Men were conventional as regards the nobler sentiments of life, but they were not conventional in the spirit which excludes from conversation and literature the gross and the immoral. Chesterfield wrote to his son of honor, justice, and so forth, as qualities of which he should know the names, but of no consequence compared to "manners, good-breeding, and the graces." If a man blushed, it was not at his own indecency, nor at his own vice, but at the supposition that he could be so weak as to be influenced by sentiments of delicacy. Coarseness is, of course, quite separate from immorality, although the two are usually found together. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century there was a marked distinction between them. Swift's Stella, a woman of refinement, was highly indignant at remarks being made before her of a licentious character, but she herself used expressions of the grossest description without a thought of impropriety. The same distinction is seen in the essays and novels of the time. Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, all had a moral object in their fictions—the exposure and condemnation of vice, the encouragement of virtue. And yet most of these novels, especially intended to exert a good influence, are of so coarse a nature, and describe scenes so licentious that no parent would now allow them in their children's hands. The essayists wrote principally what we should now look upon as sermons, or moral teachings, and yet very many of their papers are unfit to be read in a mixed society. Men and women were made then of coarser stuff than we. Their eyes and ears were less sensitive. They were, at best, accustomed to think and speak of things which to us seem disgusting, and of which, therefore, we think and speak as little as possible. In view of the circumstances which influenced society in the last century, this condition was a perfectly natural one. We must bear it in mind in reading contemporary literature, that we may not mistake an author's intention. But we must be careful in censuring what was, after all, only one necessary stage in the development of our own civilization. It must be said, also, that the coarseness of the eighteenth century was a healthy coarseness, bred of energetic natures and animal spirits. In our time, and in the midst of our advanced refinement there lurks a sickly sentimentality, a false modesty, and an unhealthy delicacy which are in a degree inimical to morality. We have novels in great numbers, not broadly coarse, as those of Fielding or Smollett, but insidiously immoral, painting vice and unbridled passions in an attractive light.
The same rude and physical coarseness controlled the standard of taste, and introduced boisterousness and violence even into amusements. "The present grandeur of the British nation might make us expect," wrote Steele, "that we should rise in our public diversions and manner of enjoying life, in proportion to our advancement in glory and power. Instead of that, survey this town, and you will find rakes and debauchees are your men of pleasure; thoughtless atheists and illiterate drunkards call themselves free-thinkers; and gamesters, banterers, biters, swearers, and twenty new-born insects more, are, in their several species, the modern men of wit."[131] Walpole[132] wrote in 1744: "The town has been trying all this winter to drive pantomimes off the stage, very boisterously; for it is the way here to make even an affair of taste and sense a matter of riot and arms. Fleetwood, the master of Drury Lane, has omitted nothing to support them, as they supported his house. About ten days ago he let into the pit great numbers of bear-garden bruisers (that is the term), to knock down everybody that hissed. The pit rallied their forces and drove them out. I was sitting very quietly in the boxes contemplating all this. On a sudden the curtain flew up, and discovered the whole stage filled with blackguards armed with bludgeons and clubs, to menace the audience. This raised the greatest uproar."