The most admired living authors, whom we shall be content only to name because they are living, are poets: Edmond Rostand, author of Loiterings; Edmond Haraucourt, author of The Naked Soul and The Hope of the World; Jean Aicard, author of Miette el Noré; Jean Richepin, author of Césarine, Caresses, Blasphemies, etc.; in fiction, Paul Bourget, Marcel Prévost, René Bazin, Bordeaux, Boylesve, Henri de Régnier; in history, Ernest Lavisse, Aulard, Seignobos, D'Haussonville; in philosophy, Boutroux, Bergson, Théodule Ribot, Fouillée, Izoulet; in the drama, Paul Hervieu, Lavedan, Bataille, Brieux, Porto-Riche, Bernstein, Wolff, Tristan Bernard, Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac and of The Aiglon; as orators, Alexander Ribot, De Mun Poincaré, Jaurès, etc.
CHAPTER XVI. — THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: ENGLAND
Poets of the Eighteenth Century: Pope, Young, MacPherson, etc.: Prose Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Daniel Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Swift, Sterne, David Hume. Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Byron, Shelley, the Lake Poets: Prose Writers of the Nineteenth Century: Walter Scott, Macaulay, Dickens, Carlyle.
THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE: POETS.—As in France, the eighteenth century (the age of Queen Anne) was in England richer in prose than in poetry. As poets, however, must be indicated Thomson, descriptive and dramatic, whose profound feeling for nature was not without influence over French writers of the same century; Pope, descriptive writer, translator, moralist, elegiast, very intelligent and highly polished, whose Essay on Criticism and Essay on Man were remarkably utilised by Voltaire; Edward Young, whose Night Thoughts enjoyed the same prodigious success in France as in England, and who contributed in no small measure to darken and render gloomy both literatures; MacPherson, who invented Ossian, that is, pretended poems of the Middle Ages, a magnificent genius, be it said, who exercised considerable influence over the romanticism of both lands; Chatterton, who trod the same road, but with less success, yet was valued almost equally by the French romantic poets, and to them he has owed at least the consolidation of his immortality; Cowper, elegiac and fantastic, with a highly humorous vein; Crabbe, a very close observer of popular customs and an ingenious novelist in verse, quite analogous to the Dutch painters; Burns, a peasant-poet, sensitive and impassioned, yet at the same time a careful artist moved by local customs, the manifestations of which he saw displayed before his eyes.
PROSE WRITERS.—The masters of prose (some being also true poets) were innumerable. Daniel Defoe, journalist, satirist, pamphleteer, was the author of the immortal Robinson Crusoe; Addison, justly adored by Voltaire, author of a sound tragedy, Cato, is supremely a scholar, the acute, sensible, and extremely thoughtful editor of The Spectator; Richardson, the idol of Diderot and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, enjoyed a European success with his sentimental and virtuous novels, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison. As a critic and as a personality, Dr. Johnson has no parallel in any age or land. His Dictionary is famous despite its faults, and Rasselas, which he wrote to pay for his mother's funeral, can still be read.
Fielding, who began by being only the parodist of Richardson, in Joseph Andrews, ended by becoming an astounding realistic novelist, the worthy predecessor of Thackeray and Dickens in his extraordinary Tom Jones. The amiable Goldsmith, more akin to Richardson, wrote that idyllic novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the charm of which was still felt throughout Europe only fifty years ago. Laurence Sterne, the most accurate representative of English humour, capable of emotion more especially ironical, jester, mystificator, has both amused and disquieted several generations with his Sentimental Journey and his fantastical, disconcerting and enchanting Tristram Shandy. Swift, horribly bitter, a corrosive and cruel satirist, sadly scoffed at all the society of his time in Gulliver's Travels, in Drapier's Letters, in his Proposal to Prevent the Children of the Poor Being a Burden, in a mass of other small works wherein the most infuriated wrath is sustained under the form of calm and glacial irony.
HISTORY.—History was expressed in England in the eighteenth century by David Hume, who chronicled the progress of the English race from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century; by Robertson, who similarly handled the Scotch and who narrated the reign of Charles V; and by Gibbon, so habitually familiar with the French society of his time, who followed the Romans from the first Cæsars to Marcus Aurelius, then more closely from Marcus Aurelius to the epoch of Constantine, and finally the Byzantine Empire up to the period of the Renaissance. The imposing erudition, the rather pompous but highly distinguished style of the author, without counting his animosity to Christianity, caused him to enjoy a great success, especially in France. The work of Gibbon is regarded as the finest example of history written by an Englishman.
THE STAGE.—The stage in England in the eighteenth century sank far below its importance in the seventeenth century; yet who does not know She Stoops to Conquer of Goldsmith, and that sparkling and lively comedy, The School for Scandal, by Sheridan? Note, as an incomparable journalist, the famous and mysterious Junius, who, from 1769 to 1772, waged such terrible war on the minister Grafton.