History of the English People, Volume VII / The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767

by John Richard Green

The intellectual advance.

Ever since the expulsion of the Stuarts an intellectual revolution had been silently going on in the people at large. The close of the seventeenth century was marked by a sudden extension of the world of readers. The developement of men's minds under the political and social changes of the day, as well as the rapid increase of wealth, and the advance in culture and refinement which accompanies an increase of wealth, were quickening the general intelligence of the people at large; and the wider demand for books to read that came of this quickening gave a new extension and vigour to their sale. Addison tells us how large and rapid was the sale of his "Spectator"; and the sale of Shakspere's works shows the amazing effect of the new passion for literature on the diffusion of our older authors. Four issues of his plays in folio, none of them probably exceeding five hundred copies, had sufficed to meet the wants of the seventeenth century. But through the eighteenth ten editions at least followed each other in quick succession; and before the century was over as many as thirty thousand copies of Shakspere were dispersed throughout England. Reprints of older works however were far from being the only need of English readers. The new demand created an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed the degradation of letters. The intellectual demand for the moment outran the intellectual supply. The reader called for the writer; but the temper of the time, the diversion of its mental energy to industrial pursuits, the influences which tended to lower its poetic and imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen to any buyer, hawking their flatteries and their libels from door to door, fawning on the patron and the publisher for very bread, tagging rimes which they called poetry, or abuse which they called criticism, vamping up compilations and abridgements under the guise of history, or filling the journals with empty rhetoric in the name of politics.

Pope.

It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution; for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart. He was the son of a Catholic linen-draper, who had withdrawn from his business in Lombard Street to a retirement on the skirts of Windsor Forest; and there amidst the stormy years which followed William's accession the boy grew up in an atmosphere of poetry, buried in the study of the older English singers, stealing to London for a peep at Dryden in his arm-chair at Will's, himself already lisping in numbers, and busy with an epic at the age of twelve. Pope's latter years were as secluded as his youth. His life, as Johnson says, was "a long disease"; his puny frame, his crooked figure, the feebleness of his health, his keen sensitiveness to pain, whether of mind or body, cut him off from the larger world of men, and doomed him to the faults of a morbid temperament. To the last he remained vain, selfish, affected; he loved small intrigues and petty lying; he was incredibly jealous and touchy; he dwelt on the fouler aspect of things with an unhealthy pruriency; he stung right and left with a malignant venom. But nobler qualities rose out of this morbid undergrowth of faults. If Pope was quickly moved to anger, he was as quickly moved to tears; though every literary gnat could sting him to passion, he could never read the lament of Priam over Hector without weeping. His sympathies lay indeed within a narrow range, but within that range they were vivid and intense; he clung passionately to the few he loved; he took their cause for his own; he flung himself almost blindly into their enthusiasms and their hates. But loyal as he was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much, or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into hangers-on of the great.

The Dunciad.

With aims and conceptions such as these, Pope looked bitterly out on the phase of transition through which English letters were passing. As yet his poetic works had shown little of the keen and ardent temper that lay within him. The promise of his spring was not that of a satirist but of the brightest and most genial of verse writers. When after some fanciful preludes his genius found full utterance in 1712, it was in the "Rape of the Lock"; and the "Rape of the Lock" was a poetic counterpart of the work of the Essayists. If we miss in it the personal and intimate charm of Addison, or the freshness and pathos of Steele, it passes far beyond the work of both in the brilliancy of its wit, in the lightness and buoyancy of its tone, in its atmosphere of fancy, its glancing colour, its exquisite verse, its irresistible gaiety. The poem remains Pope's masterpiece; it is impossible to read it without feeling that his mastery lay in social and fanciful verse, and that he missed his poetic path when he laid down the humourist for the philosopher and the critic. But the state of letters presented an irresistible temptation to criticism. All Pope's nobler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on men whose last fault was dulness. But in the main the "Dunciad" was a noble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or the grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters.

Revival of Letters.

That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not have denied. It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters. Such a protest is as true now, and perhaps as much needed now, as it was true and needed then. But it had hardly been uttered when the chaos settled itself, and the intellectual impulse which had as yet been felt mainly in the demand for literature showed itself in its supply. Even before the "Dunciad" was completed a great school of novelists was rising into fame; and the years which elapsed between the death of Pope in 1744 and that of George the Second in 1760 were filled with the masterpieces of Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. Their appearance was but a prelude of a great literary revival which marked the closing years of the eighteenth century. But the instant popularity of "Clarissa" and "Tom Jones" showed the work of intellectual preparation which had been going on through Walpole's days in the people at large; and it was inevitable that such a quickening of intelligence should tell on English politics. The very vulgarization of letters indeed, the broadsheets and pamphlets and catchpenny magazines of Grub Street, were doing for the mass of the people a work which greater writers could hardly have done. Above all the rapid extension of journalism had begun to give opinion a new information and consistency. In spite of the removal of the censorship after the Revolution the press had been slow to attain any political influence. Under the first two Georges its progress had been hindered by the absence of great topics for discussion, the worthlessness of the writers, and above all the lethargy of the time. But at the moment of George the Third's accession the impulse which Pitt had given to the national spirit, and the rise of a keener interest in politics, was fast raising the press into an intellectual and political power. Not only was the number of London newspapers fast increasing, but journals were being established in almost every considerable town.

Return of the Tories.

With impulses such as these telling every day on it more powerfully, roused as it was too into action by the larger policy of Pitt, and emboldened at once by the sense of growing wealth and of military triumph, it is clear that the nation must soon have passed from its old inaction to claim its part in the direction of public affairs. The very position of Pitt, forced as he had been into office by the sheer force of opinion in the teeth of party obstacles, showed the rise of a new energy in the mass of the people. It showed that a king who enlisted the national sentiment on his side would have little trouble in dealing with the Whigs. George indeed had no thought of such a policy. His aim was not to control the Parliament by the force of national opinion, but simply to win over the Parliament to his side, and through it to govern the nation with as little regard to its opinion as of old. But, whether he would or no, the drift of opinion aided him. Though the policy of Walpole had ruined Jacobitism, it long remained unconscious of its ruin. But when a Jacobite prince stood in the heart of the realm, and not a Jacobite answered his call, the spell of Jacobitism was broken; and the later degradation of Charles Edward's life wore finally away the thin coating of disloyalty which clung to the clergy and the squires. They were ready again to take part in politics; and in the accession of a king who unlike his two predecessors was no stranger but an Englishman, who had been born in England and spoke English, they found the opportunity they desired. From the opening of the reign Tories gradually appeared again at court.