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 was Fanny 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 of Johnsoniana, 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 the The progress of authorship. economic treatise, as exemplified for the first time in the admirable symmetry of The Wealth of Nations, the diary of a faithful observer of nature such as Gilbert White, the Fifteen 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 of The Rolliad and Anti-Jacobin afford so many excellent models; and, going to the other extreme, the ponderous archaeological or topographical monograph, as exemplified in Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, in Robert Wood’s colossal Ruins of Palmyra (1753), or the monumental History of Leicestershire by 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 his History of England in 1754. Robertson’s History of Scotland saw the light in 1759 and his Charles V. in 1769; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire came 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, who combined with 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’s Decline and Fall has 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 chest Change 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 all Cowper. 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. The Songs of Innocence and Songs 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.
Bibliographical Note.—The dearth of literary history in England makes it rather difficult to obtain a good general view of letters in Britain during the 18th century. Much may be gleaned, however, from chapters of Lecky’s History of England during the 18th Century, from Stephen’s Lectures on English Literature and Society in the 18th Century (1904), from Taine’s History of English Literature (van Laun’s translation), from vols. v. and vi. of Prof. Courthope’s History of English Poetry, and from the second volume of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1902). The two vols. dealing respectively with the Age of Pope and the Age of Johnson in Bell’s Handbooks of English Literature will be found useful, and suggestive chapters will be found in Saintsbury’s Short History and in A.H. Thompson’s Student’s History of English Literature (1901). The same may, perhaps, be said of books v. and vi. in the Bookman Illustrated History of English Literature (1906), by the present writer. Sidelights of value are to be found in Walter Raleigh’s little book on the English Novel, in Beljame’s Le Publique et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, in H.A. Beers’ History of English Romanticism in the 18th Century (1899), and above all in Sir Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought during the 18th Century; Stephen’s Hours in a Library, the monographs dealing with the period in the English Men of Letters series, the Vignettes and Portraits of Austin Dobson and George Paston, Elwin’s Eighteenth Century Men of Letters, and Thomas Wright’s Caricature History of the Georges, must also be kept in mind.
(T. Se.)
VI. The 19th Century
We have seen how great was the reverence which the 18th century paid to poetry, and how many different kinds of poetic experiment were going on, mostly by the imitative efforts of revivalists (Spenserians, Miltonians, Shakespeareans, Ballad-mongers, Scandinavian, Celtic, Gothic scholars and the like), but also in the direction of nature study and landscape description, while the more formal type of Augustan poetry, satire and description, in the direct succession of Pope, was by no means neglected.