The new trade of writing was represented most perfectly by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), who represents, too, what few writers possess, a competent knowledge of work and wages, buying and selling, the squalor and roguery of the Defoe. very hungry and the very mean. From reporting sensations and chronicling faits divers, Defoe worked his way almost insensibly to the Spanish tale of the old Mendoza or picaresque pattern. Robinson Crusoe was a true story expanded on these lines, and written down under stress of circumstance when its author was just upon sixty. Resembling that of Bunyan and, later, Smollett in the skilful use made of places, facts and figures, Defoe’s style is the mirror of man in his shirt sleeves. What he excelled in was plain, straightforward story-telling, in understanding and appraising the curiosity of the man in the street, and in possessing just the knowledge and just the patience, and just the literary stroke that would enable him most effectually to satisfy it. He was the first and cleverest of all descriptive reporters, for he knew better than any successor how and where to throw in those irrelevant details, tricks of speech and circumlocution, which tend to give an air of verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative—the funny little splutterings and 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 the Satires and Epistles, which are largely of the Pope. proverb-in-rhyme order. Yet in lucid, terse and pungent phrases he has rarely if ever been surpassed. His classical fancy, his elegant turn for periphrasis and his venomous sting alike made him the idol of that urbane age. Voltaire in 1726 had called him the best poet living, and at his death his style was paramount throughout the civilized world. It was the apotheosis of wit, point, lucidity and technical correctness. Pope was the first Englishman to make poetry pay (apart from patronage). He was flattered by imitation to an extent which threatened to throw the school of poetry which he represented into permanent discredit. Prior, Gay, Parnell, Akenside, Pomfret, Garth, Young, Johnson, Goldsmith, Falconer, Glover, Grainger, Darwin, Rogers, Hayley and indeed a host of others—the once famous mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease—worshipped Pope as their poetic founder. The second-rate wore his badge. But although the cult of Pope was the established religion of poetic taste from 1714 to 1798, there were always nonconformists. The poetic revolt, indeed, was far more versatile than the religious revival of the century. The Winter Thomson. (1726) of James Thomson may be regarded as inaugurating a new era in English poetry. Lady Winchilsea, John Philips, author of Cyder, and John Dyer, whose Grongar Hill was published a few months before Winter, had pleaded by their work for a truthful and unaffected, and at the same time a romantic treatment of nature in poetry; but the ideal of artificiality and of a frigid poetic diction by which English poetry was dominated since the days of Waller and Cowley was first effectively challenged by Thomson. At the time when the Popean couplet was at the height of its vogue he deliberately put it aside in favour of the higher poetic power of blank verse. And he it was who transmitted the sentiment of natural beauty not merely to imitators such as Savage, Armstrong, Somerville, 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 of The Faerie Queene; a little later, owing to the virtuosity of Bishop Percy, the cultivation of the old English and Scottish ballad literature was beginning to take a serious turn. Dissatisfaction with the limitations of “Augustan” poetry was similarly responsible for the revived interest in Shakespeare and Chaucer. Gray stood not only for a far more intimate worship of wild external nature, but also for an awakened curiosity in Scandinavian, Celtic and Icelandic poetry.
To pretend then that the poetic heart of the 18th century was Popean to the core is nothing short of extravagance. There were a number of true poets in the second and third quarters of the century to whom all credit is due as pioneers and precentors of the romantic movement under the depressing conditions to which innovators in poetry are commonly subject. They may strike us as rather an anaemic band after the great Elizabethan poets. Four of them were mentally deranged (Collins, Smart, Cowper, Blake), while Gray was a hermit, and Shenstone and Thomson the most indolent of recluses. The most adventurous, one might say the most virile of the group, was a boy who died at the age of seventeen. Single men all (save for Blake), a more despondent group of artists as a whole it would not perhaps be easy to discover. Catacombs and cypresses were the forms of imagery that came to them most naturally. Elegies and funeral odes were the types of expression in which they were happiest. Yet they strove in the main to follow the gleam in poetry, to reinstate imagination upon its throne, and to substitute the singing voice for the rhetorical recitative of the heroic couplet. Within two years of the death of Pope, in 1746, William Collins was content to sing (not say) what he had in him without a glimpse of wit or a flash of eloquence—and in him many have discerned the germ of that romantic éclosion which blossomed in Christabel. A more important if less original factor in that movement was Collins’s severe critic Thomas Gray, a man of the widest curiosities of his time, in whom every attribute of the poet to which scholarship, taste and refinement are contributory may be found to the full, but in whom the strong creative energy is fatally lacking—despite the fact that he wrote a string of “divine truisms” in his Elegy, which has given to multitudes more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in the English language. Shenstone and Percy, Capell, the Wartons and eventually Chatterton, continued to mine in the shafts which Gray had been the first to sink. Their laborious work of discovery resembled that which was commencing in regard to the Gothic architecture which the age of Pope had come to regard as rude and barbaric. The Augustans had come seriously to regard all pre-Drydenic poetry as grossly barbarian. One of the greatest achievements of the mid-eighteenth century was concerned with the disintegration of this obstinate delusion. The process was manifold; and it led, among other things, to a realization of the importance of the study of comparative literature.
The literary grouping of the 18th century is, perhaps, the biggest thing on the whole that English art has to show; but among all its groups the most famous, and probably the most original, is that of its proto-novelists The 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 of Morte d’Arthur. Such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic; the new centos of tales of chivalry like the Seven Champions of Christendom; the utopian, political and philosophical romances (Oceana, The Man in the Moone); the grotesque and facetious stories of rogues retailed from the Spanish or French in dwarf volumes; the prolix romance of modernized classic heroism (The Grand Cyrus); the religious allegory (Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr Badman); the novels of outspoken French or Italian gallantry, represented by Aphra Behn; the imaginary voyages so notably adapted to satire by Dr Swift; and last, but not least, the minutely prosaic chronicle-novels of Daniel Defoe. The prospect of the novel was changing rapidly. The development of the individual and of a large well-to-do urban middle class, which was rapidly multiplying its area of leisure, involved a curious and self-conscious society, hungry for pleasure and new sensations, anxious to be told about themselves, willing in some cases even to learn civilization from their betters. The disrepute into which the drama had fallen since Jeremy Collier’s attack on it directed this society by an almost inevitable course into the flowery paths of fiction. The novel, it is true, had a reputation which was for the time being almost as unsavoury as that of the drama, but the novel was not a confirmed ill-doer, and it only needed a touch of genius to create for it a vast congregation of enthusiastic votaries. In the Tatler and Spectator were already found the methods and subjects of the modern novel. The De Coverley papers in the Spectator, in fact, want nothing but a love-thread to convert them into a serial novel of a high order. The supreme importance of the sentimental interest had already been discovered and exemplified to good purpose in France by Madame de la Fayette, the Marquise de Tencin, Marivaux and the Abbé Prevost. Richardson. Samuel Richardson (1689-1762), therefore, when he produced the first two modern novels of European fame in Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), inherited far more than he invented. There had been Richardsonians before Richardson. Clarissa is nevertheless a pioneer work, and we have it on the high authority of M. Jusserand that the English have contributed more than any other people to the formation of the contemporary novel. Of the long-winded, typical and rather chaotic English novel of love analysis and moral sentiment (as opposed to the romance of adventure) Richardson is the first successful charioteer.
The novel in England gained prodigiously by the shock of opposition between the ideals of Richardson and Henry Fielding (1707-1754), his rival and parodist. Fielding’s brutal toleration is a fine corrective to the slightly rancid Fielding. morality of Richardson, with its frank insistence upon the cash-value of chastity and virtue. Fielding is, to be brief, the succinct antithesis of Richardson, and represents the opposite pole of English character. He is the Cavalier, Richardson the Roundhead; he is the gentleman, Richardson the tradesman; he represents church and county, Richardson chapel and borough. Richardson had much of the patient insight and intensity of genius, but he lacked the humour and literary accomplishment which Fielding had in rich abundance. Fielding combined breadth and keenness, classical culture and a delicate Gallic irony to an extent rare among English writers. He lacked the delicate intuition of Richardson in the analysis of women, nor Smollett. 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’œuvre Tom Jones (1749) that we must regard if not as the fundament at least as the head of the corner in English prose fiction. Before Tom Jones appeared, the success of the novel had drawn a new competitor into the field in Tobias Smollett, the descendant of a good western lowland family who had knocked about the world and seen more of its hurlyburly than Fielding himself. In Roderick Random (1748) Smollett represents a rougher and more uncivilized world even than that depicted in Joseph Andrews. The savagery and horse-play peculiar to these two novelists derives in part from the rogue romance of Spain (as then recently revived by Lesage), and has a counterpart to some extent in the graphic art of Hogarth and Rowlandson; yet one cannot altogether ignore an element of exaggeration which has greatly injured both these writers in the estimation (and still more in the affection) of posterity. The genius which struggles through novels such as Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom was nearly submerged under the hard conditions of a general writer during the third quarter of the 18th century, and it speaks volumes for Smollett’s powers of recuperation that he survived to write two such masterpieces of sardonic and humorous observation as his Travels and Humphry Clinker.
The fourth proto-master of the English novel was the antiquarian humorist Lawrence Sterne. Though they owed a good deal to Don Quixote and the French novelists, Fielding and Smollett were essentially observers of life in the quick. Sterne. Sterne brought a far-fetched style, a bookish apparatus and a deliberate eccentricity into fiction. Tristram Shandy, produced successively in nine small volumes between 1760 and 1764, is the pretended history of a personage who is not born (before the fourth volume) and hardly ever appears, carried on in an eccentric rigmarole of old and new, original and borrowed humour, arranged in a style well known to students of the later Valois humorists as fatrasie. Far more than Molière, Sterne took his literary bien wherever he found it. But he invented a kind of tremolo style of his own, with the aid of which, in conjunction with the most unblushingly indecent innuendoes, and with a conspicuous genius for humorous portraiture, trembling upon the verge of the pathetic, he succeeded in winning a new domain for the art of fiction.
These four great writers then, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne—all of them great pessimists in comparison with the benignant philosophers of a later fiction—first thoroughly fertilized this important field. Richardson obtained a European fame during his lifetime. Sterne, as a pioneer impressionist, gave all subsequent stylists a new handle. Fielding and Smollett grasped the new instrument more vigorously, and fashioned with it models which, after serving as patterns to Scott, Marryat, Cooper, Ainsworth, Dickens, Lever, Stevenson, Merriman, Weyman and other romancists of the 19th century, have still retained a fair measure of their original popularity unimpaired.
Apart from the novelists, the middle period of the 18th century is strong in prose writers: these include Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. The last three were all influenced by the sovereign Johnson. lucidity of the best French style of the day. Chesterfield and Walpole were both writers of aristocratic experience and of European knowledge and sentiment. Johnson alone was a distinctively English thinker and stylist. His knowledge of the world, outside England, was derived from books, he was a good deal of a scholar, an earnest moralist, and something of a divine; his style, at any rate, reaches back to Taylor, Barrow and South, and has a good deal of the complex structure, the cadence, and the balance of English and Latinistic words proper to the 17th century, though the later influence of Addison and Bolingbroke is also apparent; Johnson himself was fond of the essay, the satire in verse, and the moral tale (Rasselas); but he lacked the creative imagination indispensable for such work and excelled chiefly as biographer and critic. For a critic even, it must be admitted that he was singly deficient in original ideas. He upholds authority. He judges by what he regards as the accepted rules, derived by Dryden, Rapin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Rymer, Dennis, Pope and such “estimable critics” from the ancients, whose decisions on such matters he regards as paramount. He tries to carry out a systematic, motived criticism; but he asserts rather than persuades or convinces. We go to his critical works (Lives of the Poets and Essay on Shakespeare) not for their conclusions, but for their shrewd comments on life, and for an application to literary problems of a caustic common sense. Johnson’s character and conversation, his knowledge and memory were far more remarkable than his ideas or his writings, admirable though the best of these were; the exceptional traits which met in his person and made that age regard him as a nonpareil have found in James Boswell a delineator unrivalled in patience, dexterity and dramatic insight. The result has been a portrait of a man of letters more alive at the present time than that which any other age or nation has bequeathed to us. In most of his ideas Johnson was a generation behind the typical academic critics of his date, Joseph and Thomas Warton, who championed against his authority what the doctor regarded as the finicking notions of Gray. Both of the Wartons were enthusiastic for Spenser and the older poetry; they were saturated with Milton whom they placed far above the correct Mr Pope, they wrote sonnets (thereby provoking Johnson’s ire) and attempted to revive medieval and Celtic lore in every direction. Johnson’s one attempt at a novel or tale was Rasselas, a long “Rambler” essay upon the vanity of human hope and ambition, something after the manner of the Oriental tales of which Voltaire had caught the idea from Swift and Montesquieu; but Rasselas is quite unenlivened by humour, personality or any other charm.
This one quality that Johnson so completely lacked was possessed in its fullest perfection by Oliver Goldsmith, whose style is the supreme expression of 18th-century clearness, simplicity and easy graceful fluency. Much of Goldsmith. 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 the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; ten years more saw the commencement of Lord Hervey’s Memoirs of the Reign of George II.; and Lord Chesterfield and Lord Orford Chesterfield and Walpole. (better known as Horace Walpole) both began their inimitable series of Letters about 1740. These writings, none of them written ostensibly for the press, serve to show the enormous strides that English prose was making as a medium of vivacious description. The letters are all the recreation of extensive knowledge and cosmopolitan acquirements; they are not strong on the poetic or imaginative side of things, but they have an intense appreciation of the actual and mundane side of fallible humanity. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his son and to his godson are far more, for they introduce a Ciceronian polish and a Gallic irony and wit into the hitherto uncultivated garden of the literary graces in English prose. Chesterfield, whose theme is manners and social amenity, deliberately seeks a form of expression appropriate to his text—the perfection of tact, neatness, good order and savoir faire. After his grandfather, the marquess of Halifax, Lord Chesterfield, the synonym in the vulgar world for a heartless exquisite, is in reality the first fine gentleman and epicurean in the best sense in English polite literature. Both Chesterfield and Walpole were conspicuous as raconteurs in an age of witty talkers, of whose talk R.B. Sheridan, in The School for Scandal (1777), served up a suprême. Some of it may be tinsel, but it looks wonderfully well under the lights. The star comedy of the century represents the sparkle of this brilliant crowd: it reveals no hearts, but it shows us every trick of phrase, every eccentricity of manner and every foible of thought. But the most mundane of the letter writers, the most frivolous, and also the most pungent, is Horace Walpole, whose writings are an epitome of the history and biography of the Georgian era. “Fiddles sing all through them, wax lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle; never was such a brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us.” Yet, in some ways, he was a corrective to the self-complacency of his generation, a vast dilettante, lover of “Gothic,” of curios and antiques, of costly printing, of old illuminations and stained glass. In his short miracle-novel, called The Castle of Otranto, he set a fashion for mystery and terror in fiction, for medieval legend, diablerie, mystery, horror, antique furniture and Gothic jargon, which led directly by the route of Anne Radcliffe, Maturin, Vathek, St Leon and Frankenstein, to Queenhoo Hall, to Waverley and even to Hugo and Poe.