English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter 2

Prev List Next

and it is the worthy utterance of one good legacy which the deist bequeathed to posterity. Pope himself was alarmed when he discovered that he had slipped unawares into heterodoxy. His creed was not congenial to the average mind, though it was to that of his immediate circle. Meanwhile, his most characteristic and successful work was of a different order. The answer, in fact, to the problem which I have just stated, is that the only kind of poetry that was congenial to his environment was satire--if satire can be called poetry. Pope"s satires, the "Epistle to Arbuthnot," the "Epilogue," and some of the "Imitations of Horace," represent his best and most lasting achievement. There he gives the fullest expression to the general sentiment in the most appropriate form. His singular command of language, and, within his own limits, of versification, was turned to account by conscientious and unceasing labour in polishing his style. Particular pa.s.sages, like the famous satire upon Addison, have been slowly elaborated; he has brooded over them for years; and, if the result of such methods is sometimes a mosaic rather than a continuous current of discourse, the extraordinary brilliance of some pa.s.sages has made them permanently interesting and enriched our literature with many proverbial phrases. The art was naturally cultivated and its results appreciated in the circle formed by such men as Congreve, Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield and the like, by whom witty conversation was cultivated as a fine art. Chesterfield tells us that he never spoke without trying to express himself as well as possible; and Pope carries out the principle in his poetry. The thorough polish has preserved the numerous phrases, still familiar, which have survived the general neglect of his work. Pope indeed manages to introduce genuine poetry, as in his famous compliments or his pa.s.sage about his mother, in which we feel that he is really speaking from his heart. But no doubt Atterbury gave him judicious (if not very Christian) advice, when he told him to stick to the vein of the Addison verses. The main topic of the satires is a denunciation of an age when, as he puts it,

"Not to be corrupted is the shame."

He ascribes his own indignation to the "strong antipathy of good to bad," which is a satisfactory explanation to himself. But he was still interpreting the general sentiment and expressing the general discontent caused by the Walpole system. His friends, Bolingbroke and Wyndham, and the whole opposition, partially recruited from Walpole"s supporters, were insisting upon the same theme. If, as I have said, some of them were really sincere in recognising the evil, and, like Bolingbroke in the _Patriot King_, trying to ascertain its source--we are troubled in this even by the doubt as to whether they objected to corruption or only to the corrupt influence of their antagonists. But Pope, as a poet, living outside the political circle, can take the denunciations quite seriously and be not only pointed but really dignified. He sincerely believes that vice can be seriously discouraged by lashing at it with epigrams. So far, he represented a general feeling of the literary cla.s.s, explained in various ways by such men as Thomson, Fielding, Glover, and Johnson, who were, from very different points of view, in opposition to Walpole. Satire can only flourish under some such conditions as then existed. It supposes, among other things, the existence of a small cultivated cla.s.s, which will fully appreciate the personalities, the dexterity of insinuation, and the cutting sarcasm which gives the spice to much of Pope"s satire. Young, a singularly clever writer, was eclipsed by Pope because he kept to denoting general types and was not intimate with the actors on the social stage. Johnson, still more of an outsider, wrote a most effective and sonorous poem with the help of Juvenal; but it becomes a moral disquisition upon human nature which has not the special sting and sparkle of Pope. No later satirist has approached Pope, and the art has now become obsolete, or is adopted merely as a literary amus.e.m.e.nt. One obvious reason is the absence of the peculiar social backing which composed Pope"s audience and supplied him with his readers.

The growing sense that there was something wrong about the political system which Pope turned to account was significant of coming changes.

The impression that the evil was entirely due to Walpole personally was one of the natural illusions of party warfare, and the disease was not extirpated when the supposed cause was removed. The most memorable embodiment of the sentiment was Swift. The concentrated scorn of corruption in the _Drapier"s Letters_ was followed by the intense misanthropy of _Gulliver"s Travels_. The singular way in which Swift blends personal aversion with political conviction, and the strange humour which conceals the misanthropist under a superficial playfulness, veils to some extent his real aim. But Swift showed with unequalled power and in an exaggerated form the conviction that there was something wrong in the social order, which was suggested by the conditions of the time and was to bear fruit in later days. Satire, however, is by its nature negative; it does not present a positive ideal, and tends to degenerate into mere hopeless pessimism. Lofty poetry can only spring from some inner positive enthusiasm.

I turn to another characteristic of the literary movement. I have called attention to the fact that while the Queen Anne writers were never tired of appealing to nature, they came to be considered as prematurely "artificial." The commonest meaning of "natural" is that in which it is identified with "normal," We call a thing natural when its existence appears to us to be a matter of course, which again may simply mean that we are so accustomed to certain conditions that we do not remember that they are really exceptional. We take ourselves with all our peculiarities to be the "natural" type or standard. An English traveller in France remarked that it was unnatural for soldiers to be dressed in blue; and then, remembering certain British cases, added, "except, indeed, for the Artillery or the Blue Horse." The English model, with all its variations, appeared to him to be ordained by Nature. This unconscious method of usurping a general name so as to cover a general meaning produces many fallacies. In any case, however, it was of the essence of Pope"s doctrine that we should, as he puts it, "Look through Nature up to Nature"s G.o.d." G.o.d, that is, is known through Nature, if it would not be more correct to say that G.o.d and Nature are identical. This Nature often means the world as not modified by human action, and therefore sharing the divine workmanship unspoilt by man"s interference.

Thus in the common phrase, the "love of Nature" is generally taken to mean the love of natural scenery, of sea and sky and mountains, which are not altered or alterable by any human art. Yet it is said the want of any such love describes one of the most obvious deficiencies in Pope"s poetry, of which Wordsworth so often complained. His famous preface a.s.serts the complete absence of any imagery from Nature in the writings of the time. It was, however, at the period of which I am speaking that a change was taking place which was worth considering.

One cause is obvious. The Wit utters the voice of the town. He agreed with the gentleman who preferred the smell of a flambeau in St. James Street to any abundance of violet and sweetbriar. But, as communications improved between town and country, the separation between the taste of cla.s.ses became less marked. The great n.o.bleman had always been in part an exalted squire, and had a taste for field-sports as well as for the opera. Bolingbroke and Walpole are both instances in point. Sir Roger de Coverley came up to town more frequently than his ancestors, but the _Spectator_ recorded his visits as those of a simple rustic. After the peace, the country gentleman begins regularly to visit the Continent.

The "grand tour" mostly common in the preceding century becomes a normal fact of the education of the upper cla.s.ses. The foundation of the Dilettante Club in 1734 marks the change. The qualifications, says Horace Walpole, were drunkenness and a visit to Italy. The founders of it seem to have been jovial young men who had met each other abroad, where, with obsequious tutors and out of sight of domestic authority, they often learned some very queer lessons. But many of them learned more, and by degrees the Dilettante Club took not only to encouraging the opera in England, but to making really valuable archaeological researches in Greece and elsewhere. The intelligent youth had great opportunities of mixing in the best foreign society, and began to bring home the pictures which adorn so many English country houses; to talk about the "correggiosity of Correggio"; and in due time to patronise Reynolds and Gainsborough. The traveller began to take some interest even in the Alps, wrote stanzas to the "Grande Chartreuse," admired Salvator Rosa, and even visited Chamonix. Another characteristic change is more to the present purpose. A conspicuous mark of the time was a growing taste for gardening. The taste has, I suppose, existed ever since our ancestors were turned out of the Garden of Eden. Milton"s description of that place of residence, and Bacon"s famous essay, and Cowley"s poems addressed to the great authority Evelyn, and most of all perhaps Maxwell"s inimitable description of the very essence of garden, may remind us that it flourished in the seventeenth century. It is needless to say in Oxford how beautiful an old-fashioned garden might be. But at this time a change was taking place in the canons of taste.

Temple in a well-known essay had praised the old-fashioned garden and had remarked how the regularity of English plantations seemed ridiculous to--of all people in the world--the Chinese. By the middle of the eighteenth century there had been what is called a "reaction," and the English garden, which was called "natural," was famous and often imitated in France. It is curious to remark how closely this taste was a.s.sociated with the group of friends whom Pope has celebrated. The first, for example, of the four "Moral Epistles," is addressed to Cobham, who laid out the famous garden at Stowe, in which "Capability Brown," the most popular landscape gardener of the century, was brought up; the third is addressed to Bathurst, an enthusiastic gardener, who had shown his skill at his seat of Richings near Colnbrook; and the fourth to Burlington, whose house and gardens at Chiswick were laid out by Kent, the famous landscape gardener and architect--Brown"s predecessor. In the same epistle Pope ridicules the formality of Chandos" grounds at Canons. A description of his own garden includes the familiar lines

"Here St. John mingles with my friendly bowl The feast of reason and the flow of soul, And he (Peterborough) whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines Now forms my quincunx and now ranks my vines, Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain."

Pope"s own garden was itself a model. "Pope," says Horace Walpole, "had twisted and twirled and rhymed and harmonised his little five acres till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening beyond one another, and the whole surrounded with thick impenetrable woods." The taste grew as the century advanced. Now one impulse towards the new style is said to have come from articles in the _Spectator_ by Addison and in the _Guardian_ by Pope, ridiculing the old-fashioned mode of clipping trees, and so forth. Nature, say both, is superior to art, and the man of genius, as Pope puts it, is the first to perceive that all art consists of "imitation and study of nature." Horace Walpole in his essay upon gardening remarks a point which may symbolise the principle. The modern style, he says, sprang from the invention of the ha-ha by Bridgeman, one of the first landscape gardeners. The "ha-ha"

meant that the garden, instead of being enclosed by a wall, was laid out so as to harmonise with the surrounding country, from which it was only separated by an invisible fence. That is the answer to the problem; is it not a solecism for a lover of gardens to prefer nature to art? A garden is essentially a product of art? and supplants the moor and desert made by una.s.sisted nature. The love of Nature as understood in a later period, by Byron for example, went to this extreme, in words at least, and becomes misanthropical in admiring the savage for its own sake. But the landscape gardener only meant that his art must be in some sense subordinate to nature; that he must not shut out the wider scenery but include it in his designs. He was apt to look upon mountains as a background to parks, as Telford thought that rivers were created to supply ca.n.a.ls. The excellent Gilpin, who became an expounder of what he calls "the theory of the picturesque," travelled on the Wye in the same year as Gray; and amusingly criticises nature from this point of view.

Nature, he says, works in a cold and singular style of composition, but has the merit of never falling into "mannerism." Nature, that is, is a sublime landscape gardener whose work has to be accepted, and to whom the gardener must accommodate himself. A quaint instance of this theory may be found in the lecture which Henry Tilney in _Mansfield Park_ delivers to Catherine Morland. In Horace Walpole"s theory, the evolution of the ha-ha, means that man and nature, the landowner and the country, are gradually forming an alliance, and it comes to the same thing whether one or the other a.s.similates his opposite.

Briefly, this means one process by which the so-called love of nature was growing; it meant better roads and inns; the gradual reflux of town into country; and the growing sense already expressed by Cowley and Marvell, that overcrowded centres of population have their inconveniences, and that the citizen should have his periods of communion with unsophisticated nature. Squire and Wit are each learning to appreciate each other"s tastes. The tourist is developed, and begins, as Gibbon tells us, to "view the glaciers" now that he can view them without personal inconvenience. This, again, suggests that there is nothing radically new in the so-called love of nature. Any number of poets from Chaucer downwards may be cited to show that men were never insensible to natural beauty of scenery; to the outburst of spring, or the bloom of flowers, or the splendours of storms and sunsets. The indifference to nature of the Pope school was, so far, the temporary complacency of the new population focused in the metropolitan area in their own enlightenment and their contempt for the outside rustic. The love of field-sports was as strong as ever in the squire, and as soon as he began to receive some of the intellectual irradiation from the town Wit, he began to express the emotions which never found clearer utterance than in Walton"s _Compleat Angler_. But there is a characteristic difference. With the old poets nature is in the background; it supplies the scenery for human action and is not itself consciously the object; they deal with concrete facts, with the delight of sport or rustic amus.e.m.e.nts: and they embody their feelings in the old conventions; they converse with imaginary shepherds: with Robin Hood or allegorical knights in romantic forests, who represent a love of nature but introduce description only as a set-off to the actors in masques or festivals. In Pope"s time we have the abstract or metaphysical deity Nature, who can be worshipped with a distinct appreciation. The conventions have become obsolete, and if used at all, the poet himself is laughing in his sleeve. The serious aim of the poet is to give a philosophy of human nature; and the mere description of natural objects strikes him as silly unless tacked to a moral. Who could take offence, asks Pope, referring to his earlier poems, "when pure description held the place of sense"? The poet, that is, who wishes to be "sensible"

above all, cannot condescend to give mere catalogues of trees and rivers and mountains. Nature, however, is beginning to put in a claim for attention, even in the sense in which Nature means the material world. In one sense this is a natural corollary from the philosophy of the time and of that religion of nature which it implied. Pope himself gives one version of it in the _Essay on Man_; and can expatiate eloquently upon the stars and upon the animal world. But the poem itself is essentially constructed out of a philosophical theory too purely argumentative to lend itself easily to poetry. A different, though allied, way of dealing with the subject appears elsewhere. If Pope learned mainly from Bolingbroke, he was also influenced by Shaftesbury of the _Characteristics_. I note, but cannot here insist upon, Shaftesbury"s peculiar philosophical position. He inherited to some extent the doctrine of the Cambridge Platonists and repudiated the sensationalist doctrine of Locke and the metaphysical method of Clarke.

He had a marked influence on Hutcheson, Butler, and the common-sense philosophers of his day. For us, it is enough to say that he worships Nature but takes rather the aesthetic than the dialectical point of view.

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are all one, as he constantly insists, and the universe impresses us not as a set of mechanical contrivances but as an artistic embodiment of harmony. He therefore restores the universal element which is apt to pa.s.s out of sight in Pope"s rhymed arguments. He indulges his philosophical enthusiasm in what he calls _The Moralists, a Rhapsody_. It culminates in a prose hymn to a "glorious Nature, supremely fair and sovereignly good; all-loving and all-lovely, all divine," which ends by a survey of the different climates, where even in the moonbeams and the shades of the forests we find intimations of the mysterious being who pervades the universe. A love of beauty was, in this sense, a thoroughly legitimate development of the "Religion of Nature." Akenside in his philosophical poem _The Pleasures of Imagination_, written a little later, professed himself to be a disciple of Shaftesbury, and his version supplied many quotations for Scottish professors of philosophy. Henry Brooke"s _Universal Beauty_, a kind of appendix to Pope"s essay, is upon the same theme, though he became rather mixed in physiological expositions, which suggested, it is said, Darwin"s _Botanic Garden_. The religious sentiment embodied in his _Fool of Quality_ charmed Wesley and was enthusiastically admired by Kingsley. Thomson, however, best ill.u.s.trates this current of sentiment. The fine "Hymn of Nature" appended to the _Seasons_, is precisely in the same vein as Shaftesbury"s rhapsody. The descriptions of nature are supposed to suggest the commentary embodied in the hymn. He still describes the sea and sky and mountains with the more or less intention of preaching a sermon upon them. That is the justification of the "pure description" which Pope condemned in principle, and which occupies the larger part of the poem. Thomson, when he wrote the sermons, was still fresh from Edinburgh and from Teviotdale. He had a real eye for scenery, and describes from observation. The English Wits had not, it seems, annexed Scotland, and Thomson had studied Milton and Spenser without being forced to look through Pope"s spectacles. Still he cannot quite trust himself. He is still afraid, and not without reason, that pure description will fall into flat prose, and tries to "raise his diction"--in the phrase of the day--by catching something of the Miltonic harmony and by speaking of fish as "finny tribes" and birds as "the feathered people." The fact, however, that he could suspend his moralising to give realistic descriptions at full length, and that they became the most interesting parts of the poem, shows a growing interest in country life. The supremacy of the town Wit is no longer unquestioned; and there is an audience for the plain direct transcripts of natural objects for which the Wit had been too dignified and polished. Thomson had thus the merit of representing a growing sentiment--and yet he has not quite solved the problem. His philosophy is not quite fused with his observation. To make "Nature" really interesting you must have a touch of Wordsworthian pantheism and of Sh.e.l.ley"s "pathetic fallacy." Thomson"s facts and his commentary lie in separate compartments. To him, apparently, the philosophy is more important than the simple description. His masterpiece was to be the didactic and now forgotten poem on _Liberty_.

It gives an interesting application; for there already we have the sentiment which was to become more marked in later years. "Liberty"

crosses the Alps and they suggest a fine pa.s.sage on the beauty of mountains. Nature has formed them as a rampart for the homely republics which worship "plain Liberty"; and are free from the corruption typified by Walpole. That obviously is the germ of the true Rousseau version of Nature worship. On the whole, however, Nature, as interpreted by the author of "Rule Britannia," is still very well satisfied with the British Const.i.tution and looks upon the Revolution of 1688 as the avatar of the true G.o.ddess. "Nature," that is, has not yet come to condemn civilisation in general as artificial and therefore corrupt. As in practice, a lover of Nature did not profess to prefer the wilderness to fields, and looked upon mountains rather as a background to the n.o.bleman"s park than as a shelter for republics; so in politics it reflected no revolutionary tendency but rather included the true British system which has grown up under its protection. Nature has taken to lecturing, but she only became frankly revolutionary with Rousseau and misanthropic with Byron.

I must touch one more characteristic. Pope, I have said, represents the aristocratic development of literature. Meanwhile the purely plebeian society was growing, and the toe of the clown beginning to gall the kibe of the courtier. Pope"s "war with the dunces" was the historical symptom of this most important social development. The _Dunciad_, which, whatever its occasional merits, one cannot read without spasms both of disgust and moral disapproval, is the literary outcome. Pope"s morbid sensibility perverts his morals till he accepts the worst of aristocratic prejudices and treats poverty as in itself criminal. It led him, too, to attack some worthy people, and among others the "earless"

Defoe. Defoe"s position is most significant. A journalist of supreme ability, he had an abnormally keen eye for the interesting. No one could feel the pulse of his audience with greater quickness. He had already learned by inference that nothing interests the ordinary reader so much as a straightforward narrative of contemporary facts. He added the remark that it did not in the least matter whether the facts had or had not happened; and secondly, that it saved a great deal of trouble to make your facts instead of finding them. The result was the inimitable _Robinson Crusoe_, which was, in that sense, a simple application of journalistic methods, not a conscious attempt to create a new variety of novel. Alexander Selkirk had very little to tell about his remarkable experience; and so Defoe, instead of confining himself like the ordinary interviewer to facts, proceeded to tell a most circ.u.mstantial and elaborate lie--for which we are all grateful. He was doing far more than he meant. Defoe, as the most thorough type of the English cla.s.s to which he belonged, could not do otherwise than make his creation a perfect embodiment of his own qualities. _Robinson Crusoe_ became, we know, a favourite of Rousseau, and has supplied innumerable ill.u.s.trations to writers on Political Economy. One reason is that Crusoe is the very incarnation of individualism: thrown entirely upon his own resources, he takes the position with indomitable pluck; adapts himself to the inevitable as quietly and st.u.r.dily as may be; makes himself thoroughly at home in a desert island, and, as soon as he meets a native, summarily annexes him, and makes him thoroughly useful. He comes up smiling after many years as if he had been all the time in a shop in Cheapside without a hair turned. This exemplary person not only embodies the type of middle cla.s.s Briton but represents his most romantic aspirations. In those days the civilised world was still surrounded by the dim mysterious regions, where geographers placed elephants instead of towns, but where the adventurous Briton was beginning to push his way into strange native confines and to oust the wretched foreigner, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, who had dared to antic.i.p.ate him.

Crusoe is the voice of the race which was to be stirred by the story of Jenkins" ear and lay the foundation of the Empire. Meanwhile, as a literary work, it showed most effectually the power of homely realism.

There is no bother about dignity or attempt to reveal the eloquence of the polished Wit. It is precisely the plain downright English vernacular which is thoroughly intelligible to everybody who is capable of reading.

The Wit, too, as Swift sufficiently proved, could be a consummate master of that kind of writing on occasion, and Gulliver probably showed something to Crusoe. But for us the interest is the development of a new cla.s.s of readers, who won"t bother about canons of taste or care for skill in working upon the old conventional methods, but can be profoundly interested in a straightforward narrative adapted to the simplest understandings. Pope"s contempt for the dunces meant that the lower cla.s.ses were the objects of supreme contempt to the aristocratic circle, whose culture they did not share. But Defoe was showing in a new sense of the word the advantage of an appeal to Nature; for the true life and vigour of the nation was coming to be embodied in the cla.s.s which was spontaneously developing its own ideals and beginning to regard the culture of the upper circle as artificial in the objectionable sense. Outside the polished circle of wits we have the middle-cla.s.s which is beginning to read, and will read, what it really likes without bothering about Aristotle or M. Bossu: as, in the other direction, the a.s.similation between town and country is incidentally suggesting a wider range of topics, and giving a new expression to conditions which had for some time been without expression.

(1739-1763)

I am now to speak of the quarter of a century which succeeded the fall of Walpole, and includes two singularly contrasted periods. Walpole"s fall meant the accession to power of the heterogeneous body of statesmen whose virtuous indignation had been raised by his corrupt practices.

Some of them, as Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, were men of great ability; but, after a series of shifting combinations and personal intrigues, the final result was the triumph of the Pelhams--the grotesque Duke of Newcastle and his brother, who owed their success mainly to skill in the art of parliamentary management. The opposition had ousted Walpole by taking advantage of the dumb instinct which impelled us to go to war with Spain; and distracted by the interests of Hanover and the balance of power we had plunged into that complicated series of wars which lasted for some ten years, and pa.s.ses all powers of the ordinary human intellect to understand or remember. For what particular reason Englishmen were fighting at Dettingen or Fontenoy or Lauffeld is a question which a man can only answer when he has been specially crammed for examination and his knowledge has not begun to ooze out; while the abnormal incapacity of our rulers was displayed at the attack upon Carthagena or during the Pretender"s march into England.

The history becomes a shifting chaos marked by no definite policy, and the ship of State is being steered at random as one or other of the compet.i.tors for rule manages to grasp the helm for a moment. Then after another period of aimless intrigues the nation seems to rouse itself; and finding at last a statesman who has a distinct purpose and can appeal to a great patriotic sentiment, takes the leading part in Europe, wins a series of victories, and lays the foundation of the British Empire in America and India. Under Walpole"s rule the House of Commons had become definitely the dominant political body. The minister who could command it was master of the position. The higher aristocracy are still in possession of great influence, but they are ceasing to be the adequate representatives of the great political forces. They are in the comfortable position of having completely established their own privileges; and do not see any reason for extending privileges to others. Success depends upon personal intrigues among themselves and upon a proper manipulation of the Lower House which, though no overt const.i.tutional change has taken place, is coming to be more decidedly influenced by the interests of the moneyed men and the growing middle cla.s.ses. Pitt and Newcastle represent the two cla.s.ses which are coming into distinct antagonism. Pitt"s power rested upon the general national sentiment. "You have taught me," as George II. said to him, "to look for the sense of my people in other places than the House of Commons." The House of Commons, that is, should not derive its whole authority from the selfish interest of the borough-mongers but from the great outside current of patriotic sentiment and aspiration. But public opinion was not yet powerful enough to support the great minister without an alliance with the master of the small arts of intrigue. The general sentiments of discontent which had been raised by Walpole was therefore beginning to widen and deepen and to take a different form. The root of the evil, as people began to feel, was not in the individual Walpole but in the system which he represented. Brown"s _Estimate_ is often noticed in ill.u.s.tration. Brown convinced his readers, as Macaulay puts it, that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels, who richly deserved the fate in store for them of being speedily enslaved by their enemies; and the prophecy was published (1757) on the eve of the most glorious war we had ever known. It represents also, as Macaulay observes, the indignation roused by the early failures of the war and the demand that Pitt should take the helm. Brown was a very clever, though not a very profound, writer. A similar and more remarkable utterance had been made some years before (1749) by the remarkable thinker, David Hartley. The world, he said, was in the most critical state ever known. He attributes the evil to the growth of infidelity in the upper cla.s.ses; their general immorality; their sordid self-interest, which was almost the sole motive of action of the ministers; the contempt for authority of all their superiors; the worldly-mindedness of the clergy and the general carelessness as to education. These sentiments are not the mere plat.i.tudes, common to moralists in all ages. They are pointed and emphasised by the state of political and social life in the period.

Besides the selfishness and want of principle of the upper cla.s.ses, one fact upon which Hartley insists is sufficiently familiar. The Church it is obvious had been paralysed. It had no corporate activity; it was in thorough subjection to the aristocracy; the highest preferments were to be won by courting such men as Newcastle, and not by learning or by active discharge of duty; and the ordinary parson, though he might be thoroughly respectable and amiable, was dependant upon the squire as his superior upon the ministers. He took things easily enough to verify Hartley"s remarks. We must infer from later history that a true diagnosis would not have been so melancholy as Hartley supposed. The nation was not corrupt at the core. It was full of energy; and rapidly developing in many directions. The upper cla.s.ses, who had gained all they wanted, were comfortable and irresponsible; not yet seriously threatened by agitators; able to carry on a traffic in sinecures and pensions, and demoralised as every corporate body becomes demoralised which has no functions to discharge in proportion to capacities. The Church naturally shared the indolence of its rulers and patrons. Hartley exhorts the clergy to take an example from the energy of the Methodists instead of abusing them. Wesley had begun his remarkable missionary career in 1738, and the rapid growth of his following is a familiar proof on the one side of the indolence of the established authorities, and on the other of the strength of the demand for reform in cla.s.ses to which he appealed. If, that is, the clergy were not up to their duties, Wesley"s success shows that there was a strong sense of existing moral and social evils which only required an energetic leader to form a powerful organisation. I need not attempt to inquire into the causes of the Wesleyan and Evangelical movement, but must note one characteristic--it had not an intellectual but a sound moral origin.

Wesley takes his creed for granted, and it was the creed, so far as they had one, of the ma.s.ses of the nation. He is shocked by perjury, drunkenness, corruption, and so forth, but has not seriously to meet scepticism of the speculative variety. If Wesley did not, like the leader of another Oxford movement, feel bound to clear up the logical basis of his religious beliefs, he had of course to confront deism, but could set it down as a mere product of moral indifference. When Hartley, like Butler, speaks of the general unbelief of the day, he was no doubt correct within limits. In the upper social sphere the tone was sceptical. Not only Bolingbroke but such men as Chesterfield and Walpole were indifferent or contemptuous. They were prepared to go with Voltaire"s development of the English rationalism. But the English sceptic of the upper cla.s.ses was generally a Gallio. He had no desire to propagate his creed, still less to attack the Church, which was a valuable part of his property; it never occurred to him that scepticism might lead to a political as well as an ecclesiastical revolution.

Voltaire was not intentionally destructive in politics, whatever the real effect of his teaching; but he was an avowed and bitter enemy of the Church and the orthodox creed. Hume, the great English sceptic, was not only a Tory in politics but had no desire to affect the popular belief. He could advise a clergyman to preach the ordinary doctrines, because it was paying far too great a compliment to the vulgar to be punctilious about speaking the truth to them. A similar indifference is characteristic of the whole position. The select cla.s.ses were to be perfectly convinced that the accepted creed was superst.i.tious; but they were not for that reason to attack it. To the statesman, as Gibbon was to point out, a creed is equally useful, true or false; and the English clergy, though bound to use orthodox language, were far too well in hand to be regarded as possible persecutors. Even in Scotland they made no serious attempt to suppress Hume; he had only to cover his opinions by some decent professions of belief. One symptom of the general state of mind is the dying out of the deist controversies. The one great divine, according to Brown"s _Estimate_, was Warburton, the colossus, he says, who bestrides the world: and Warburton, whatever else he may have been, was certainly of all divines the one whose argument is most palpably fict.i.tious, if not absolutely insincere. He marks, however, the tendency of the argument to become historical. Like a much acuter writer, Conyers Middleton, he is occupied with the curious problem: how do we reconcile the admission that miracles never happen with the belief that they once happened?--or are the two beliefs reconcilable? That means, is history continuous? But it also means that the problems of abstract theology were pa.s.sing out of sight, and that speculation was turning to the historical and scientific problems. Hartley was expounding the a.s.sociation principle which became the main doctrine of the empirical school, and Hume was teaching ethics upon the same basis, and turning from speculation to political history. The main reason of this intellectual indifference was the social condition under which the philosophical theory found no strong current of political discontent with which to form an alliance. The middle cla.s.ses, which are now growing in strength and influence, had been indifferent to the discussions going on above their heads. The more enlightened clergy had, of course, been engaged in the direct controversy, and had adopted a kind of mild common-sense rationalism which implied complete indifference to the dogmatic disputes of the preceding century. The Methodist movement produced a little revival of the Calvinist and Arminian controversy. But the beliefs of the great ma.s.s of the population were not materially affected: they held by sheer force of inertia to the old traditions, and still took themselves to be good orthodox Protestants, though they had been unconsciously more affected by the permeation of rationalism than they realised.

So much must be said, because the literary work was being more and more distinctly addressed to the middle cla.s.s. The literary profession is now taking more of the modern form. Grub Street is rapidly becoming respectable, and its denizens--as Beauclerk said of Johnson when he got his pension--will be able to "purge and live cleanly like gentlemen."

Johnson"s incomparable letter (1755) rejecting Chesterfield"s attempt to impose his patronage, is the familiar indication of the change. Johnson had been labouring in the employment of the booksellers, and always, unlike some more querulous authors, declares that they were fair and liberal patrons--though it is true that he had to knock down one of them with a folio. Other writers of less fame can turn an honest penny by providing popular literature of the heavier kind. There is a demand for "useful information." There was John Campbell, for example, the "richest author," said Johnson, who ever grazed "the common of literature," who contributed to the _Modern Universal History_, the _Biographica Britannica_, and wrote the _Lives of the Admirals_ and the _Political Survey of Great Britain_, and innumerable historical and statistical works; and the queer adventurer Sir John Hill, who turned out book after book with marvellous rapidity and impudence, and is said to have really had some knowledge of botany. The industrious drudges and clever charlatans could make a respectable income. Smollett is a superior example, whose "literary factory," as it has been said, "was in full swing" at this period, and who, besides his famous novels, was journalist, historian, and author of all work, and managed to keep himself afloat, though he also contrived to exceed his income and was supported by a number of inferior "myrmidons" who helped to turn out his hackwork. He describes the author"s position in a famous pa.s.sage in _Humphry Clinker_ (1756). Smollett also started the _Critical Review_ in rivalry to the _Monthly Review_, begun by Griffiths a few years before (1749), and these two were for a long time the only precursors to the _Edinburgh Review_, and marked an advance upon the old _Gentleman"s Magazine_. In other words, we have the beginning of a new tribunal or literary Star Chamber. The author has not to inquire what is said of his performances in the coffee-houses, where the Wits gathered under the presidency of Addison or Swift. The professional critic has appeared who will make it his regular business to give an account of all new books, and though his reviews are still comparatively meagre and apt to be mere a.n.a.lyses, it is implied that a kind of public opinion is growing up which will decide upon his merits, and upon which his success or failure will depend. That means again that the readers to whom he is to appeal are mainly the middle cla.s.s, who are not very highly cultivated, but who have at any rate reached the point of reading their newspaper and magazine regularly, and buy books enough to make it worth while to supply the growing demand. The n.o.bleman has ceased to consider the patronage of authors as any part of his duty, and the tradition which made him consider writing poetry as a proper accomplishment is dying out. Since that time our aristocracy as such has been normally illiterate. Peers--Byron, for example--have occasionally written books; and more than one person of quality has, like Fox, kept up the interest in cla.s.sical literature which he acquired at a public school, and added a charm to his parliamentary oratory. The great man, too, as I have said, could take his chance in political writing, and occasionally condescend to show his skill at an essay of the _Spectator_ model. But a certain contempt for the professional writer is becoming characteristic, even of men like Horace Walpole, who have a real taste for literature.

He is inclined to say, as Chesterfield put it in a famous speech, "We, my lords, may thank Heaven that we have something better than our brains to depend upon." As literature becomes more of a regular profession, your n.o.ble wishes to show his independence of anything like a commercial pursuit. Walpole can speak politely to men like Gibbon, and even to Hume, who have some claim to be gentlemen as well as authors; but he feels that he is condescending even to them, and has nothing but contemptuous aversion for a Johnson, whose claim to consideration certainly did not include any special refinement. Johnson and his circle had still an odour of Grub street, which is only to be kept at a distance more carefully because it is in a position of comparative independence. Meanwhile, the author himself holds by the authority of Addison and Pope. They, he still admits for the most part, represent the orthodox church; their work is still taken to be the perfection of art, and the canons which they have handed down have a prestige which makes any dissenter an object of suspicion. Yet as the audience has really changed, a certain change also makes itself felt in the substance and the form of the corresponding literature.

One remarkable book marks the opening of the period. The first part of Young"s _Night Thoughts_ appeared in 1742, and the poem at once acquired a popularity which lasted at least through the century. Young had been more or less a.s.sociated with the Addison and Pope circles, in the later part of Queen Anne"s reign. He had failed to obtain any satisfactory share of the patronage which came to some of his fellows. He is still a Wit till he has to take orders for a college living as the old Wits"

circle is decaying. He tried with little success to get something by attaching himself to some questionable patrons who were induced to carry on the practice, and the want of due recognition left him to the end of his life as a man with a grievance. He had tried poetical epistles, and satires, and tragedies with undeniable success and had shown undeniable ability. Yet somehow or other he had not, one may say, emerged from the second cla.s.s till in the _Night Thoughts_ he opened a new vein which exactly met the contemporary taste. The success was no doubt due to some really brilliant qualities, but I need not here ask in what precise rank he should be placed, as an author or a moralist. His significance for us is simple. The _Night Thoughts_, as he tells us, was intended to supply an omission in Pope"s _Essay on Man_. Pope"s deistical position excluded any reference to revealed religion, to posthumous rewards and penalties, and expressed an optimistic philosophy which ignored the corruption of human nature. Young represents a partial revolt against the domination of the Pope circle. He had always been an outsider, and his life at Oxford had, you may perhaps hope, preserved his orthodoxy. He writes blank verse, though evidently the blank verse of a man accustomed to the "heroic couplets"; he uses the conventional "poetic diction"; he strains after epigrammatic point in the manner of Pope, and the greater part of his poem is an elaborate argumentation to prove the immortality of man--chiefly by the argument from astronomy. But though so far accepting the old method, his success in introducing a new element marks an important change. He is elaborately and deliberately pathetic; he is always thinking of death, and calling upon the readers to sympathise with his sorrows and accept his consolations. The world taken by itself is, he maintains, a huge lunatic asylum, and the most hideous of sights is a naked human heart. We are, indeed, to find sufficient consolation from the belief in immortality. How far Young was orthodox or logical or really edifying is a question with which I am not concerned. The appet.i.te for this strain of melancholy reflection is characteristic.

Blair"s _Grave_, representing another version of the sentiment, appeared simultaneously and independently. Blair, like Thomson, living in Scotland, was outside the Pope circle of wit, and had studied the old English authors instead of Pope and Dryden. He negotiated for the publication of his poem through Watts and Doddridge, each of whom was an eminent interpreter of the religious sentiment of the middle cla.s.ses.

Both wrote hymns still popular, and Doddridge"s _Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul_ has been a permanently valued manual. The Pope school had omitted religious considerations, and treated religion as a system of abstract philosophy. The new cla.s.s of readers wants something more congenial to the teaching of their favourite ministers and chapels. Young and Blair thoroughly suited them. Wesley admired Young"s poem, and even proposed to bring out an edition. In his _Further Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion_, Wesley, like Brown and Hartley, draws up a striking indictment of the manners of the time. He denounces the liberty and effeminacy of the n.o.bility; the widespread immorality; the chicanery of lawyers; the jobbery of charities; the stupid self-satisfaction of Englishmen; the brutality of the Army; the indolence and preferment humbug of the Church--the true cause, as he says, of the "contempt for the clergy" which had become proverbial. His remedy of course is to be found in a revival of true religion. He accepts the general sentiment that the times are out of joint, though he would seek for a deeper cause than that which was recognised by the political satirist. While Young was weeping at Welwyn, James Hervey was meditating among the tombs in Devonshire, and soon afterwards gave utterance to the result in language inspired by very bad taste, but showing a love of nature and expressing the "sentimentalism" which was then a new discovery. It is said to have eclipsed Law"s _Serious Call_, which I have already mentioned as giving, in admirable literary form, the view of the contemporary world which naturally found favour with religious thinkers.

These symptoms indicate the tendencies of the rising cla.s.s to which the author has mainly to address himself. It has ceased to be fully represented by the upper social stratum whose tastes are reflected by Pope. No distinct democratic sentiment had yet appeared; the aristocratic order was accepted as inevitable or natural; but there was a vague though growing sentiment that the rulers are selfish and corrupt. There is no strong sceptical or anti-religious sentiment; but a spreading conviction that the official pastors are scandalously careless in supplying the wants of their flocks. The philosophical and literary canons of the scholar and gentleman have become unsatisfactory; the vulgar do not care for the delicate finish appreciated by your Chesterfield and acquired in the conversations of polite society, and the indolent scepticism which leads to metaphysical expositions, and is not allied with any political or social pa.s.sion, does not appeal to them. The popular books of the preceding generation had been the directly religious books: Baxter"s _Saint"s Rest_, and the _Pilgrim"s Progress_--despised by the polite but beloved by the popular cla.s.s in spite of the critics; and among the dissenters such a work as Boston"s _Fourfold State_, or in the Church, Law"s _Serious Call_. Your polite author had ignored the devil, and he plays a part in human affairs which, as Carlyle pointed out in later days, cannot be permanently overlooked. The old horned and hoofed devil, indeed, for whom Defoe had still a weakness, shown in his _History of the Devil_, was becoming a little incredible; witchcraft was dying out, though Wesley still felt bound to profess some belief in it; and the old Calvinistic dogmatism, though it could produce a certain amount of controversy among the Methodists, had been made obsolete by the growth of rationalism. Still the new public wanted something more savoury than its elegant teachers had given; and, if sermons had ceased to be so stimulating as of old, it could find it in secular moralisers. Defoe, always keenly alive to the general taste, had tried to supply the demand not only by his queer _History of the Devil_ but by appending a set of moral reflections to _Robinson Crusoe_ and other edifying works, which disgusted Charles Lamb by their petty tradesman morality, and which hardly represent a very lofty ideal. But the recognised representative of the moralists was the ponderous Samuel Johnson. It is hard when reading the _Rambler_ to recognise the ma.s.sive common sense and deep feeling struggling with the ponderous verbiage and elephantine facetiousness; yet it was not only a treasure of wisdom to the learned ladies, Mrs. Chapone, and Mrs.

Elizabeth Carter and the like, who were now beginning to appear, but was received, without provoking ridicule, by the whole literary cla.s.s.

_Ra.s.selas_, in spite of its formality, is still a very impressive book.

The literary critic may amuse himself with the question how Johnson came to acquire the peculiar style which imposed upon contemporaries and excited the ridicule of the next generation. According to Boswell, it was due to his reading of Sir Thomas Browne, and a kind of reversion to the earlier period in which the Latinisms of Browne were still natural, when the revolt to simple prose had not begun. Addison, at any rate, as Boswell truly remarks, writes like a "companion," and Johnson like a teacher. He puts on his academical robes to deliver his message to mankind, and is no longer the Wit, echoing the coffee-house talk, but the moralist, who looks indeed at actual life, but stands well apart and knows many hours of melancholy and hypochondria. He preaches the morality of his time--the morality of Richardson and Young--only tempered by a hearty contempt for cant, sentimentalism, and all unreality, and expressing his deeper and stronger nature. The style, however acquired, has the idiosyncrasy of the man himself; but I shall have to speak of the Johnsonian view in the next period, when he became the acknowledged literary dictator and expressed one main tendency of the period.

Meanwhile Richardson, as Johnson put it, had been teaching the pa.s.sions to move at the command of virtue. In other words, Richardson had discovered an incomparably more effective way of preaching a popular sermon. He had begun, as we know, by writing a series of edifying letters to young women; and expounded the same method in _Pamela_, and afterwards in the famous _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_.

All his books are deliberate attempts to embody his ideal in model representatives of the society of his day. He might have taken a suggestion from Bunyan; who besides his great religious allegory and the curious life of _Mr. Badman_, couched a moral lesson in a description of the actual tradesman of his time. Allegory was now to be supplanted by fiction. The man was to take the place of the personified virtue and vice. Defoe had already shown the power of downright realistic storytelling; and Richardson perhaps learnt something from him when he was drawing his minute and vivid portraits of the people who might at any rate pa.s.s for being realities. I must take for granted that Richardson was a man of genius, without adding a word as to its precise quality. I need only repeat one familiar remark. Richardson was a typical tradesman of the period; he was the industrious apprentice who marries his master"s daughter; he lived between Hammersmith and Salisbury Court as a thorough middle-cla.s.s c.o.c.kney, and had not an idea beyond those common to his cla.s.s; he accepted the ordinary creeds and conventions; he looked upon freethinkers with such horror that he will not allow even his worst villains to be religious sceptics; he shares the profound reverence of the shopkeepers for the upper cla.s.ses who are his customers, and he rewards virtue with a coach and six. And yet this mild little man, with the very narrowest intellectual limitations, writes a book which makes a mark not only in England but in Europe, and is imitated by Rousseau in the book which set more than one generation weeping; _Clarissa Harlowe_, moreover, was accepted as the masterpiece of its kind, and she moved not only Englishmen but Germans and Frenchmen to sympathetic tears. One explanation is that Richardson is regarded as the inventor of "sentimentalism." The word, as one of his correspondents tells him, was a novelty about 1749, and was then supposed to include anything that was clever and agreeable. I do not myself believe that anybody invented the mode of feeling; but it is true that Richardson was the first writer who definitely turned it to account for a new literary genus. Sentimentalism, I suppose, means, roughly speaking, indulgence in emotion for its own sake. The sentimentalist does not weep because painful thoughts are forced upon him but because he finds weeping pleasant in itself. He appreciates the "luxury of grief." (The phrase is used in Brown"s _Barbarossa_; I don"t know who invented it.) Certainly the discovery was not new. The charms of melancholy had been recognised by Jaques in the forest of Arden and sung by various later poets; but sentimentalism at the earlier period naturally took the form of religious meditation upon death and judgment. Young and Hervey are religious sentimentalists, who have also an eye to literary elegance.

Wesley was far too masculine and sensible to be a sentimentalist; his emotions impel him to vigorous action; and are much too serious to be cultivated for their own sakes or to be treated aesthetically. But the general sense that something is not in order in the general state of things, without as yet any definite aim for the vague discontent, was shared by the true sentimentalist. Richardson"s sentimentalism is partly unconscious. He is a moralist very much in earnest, preaching a very practical and not very exalted morality. It is his moral purpose, his insistence upon the edifying point of view, his singular fertility in finding ill.u.s.trations for his doctrines, which makes him a sentimentalist. I will confess that the last time I read _Clarissa Harlowe_ it affected me with a kind of disgust. We wonder sometimes at the coa.r.s.e nerves of our ancestors, who could see on the stage any quant.i.ty of murders and ghosts and miscellaneous horrors. Richardson gave me the same shock from the elaborate detail in which he tells the story of Clarissa; rubbing our noses, if I may say so, in all her agony, and squeezing the last drop of bitterness out of every incident.

I should have liked some symptom that he was anxious to turn his eyes from the tragedy instead of giving it so minutely as to suggest that he enjoys the spectacle. Books sometimes owe part of their success, as I fear we must admit, to the very fact that they are in bad taste. They attract the contemporary audience by exaggerating and over-weighting the new vein of sentiment which they have discovered. That, in fact, seems to be the reason why in spite of all authority, modern readers find it difficult to read Richardson through. We know, at any rate, how it affected one great contemporary. This incessant strain upon the moral in question (a very questionable moral it is) struck Fielding as mawkish and unmanly. Richardson seemed to be a narrow, straitlaced preacher, who could look at human nature only from the conventional point of view, and thought that because he was virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale.

Fielding"s revolt produced his great novels, and the definite creation of an entirely new form of art which was destined to a long and vigorous life. He claimed to be the founder of a new province in literature, and saw with perfect clearness what was to be its nature.

The old romances which had charmed the seventeenth century were still read occasionally: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, and Dr.

Johnson had enjoyed them, and Chesterfield, at a later period, has to point out to his son that Calprenede"s _Ca.s.sandra_ has become ridiculous. The short story, of which Mrs. Behn was the last English writer, was more or less replaced by the little sketches in the _Spectator_; and Defoe had shown the attractiveness of a downright realistic narrative of a series of adventures. But whatever precedents may be found, our unfortunate ancestors had not yet the true modern novel. Fielding had, like other hack authors, written for the stage and tried to carry on the Congreve tradition. But the stage had declined.

The best products, perhaps, were the _Beggar"s Opera_ and _Chrononhotonthologos_ and Fielding"s own _Tom Thumb_. When Fielding tried to make use of the taste for political lampoons, the result was the Act of Parliament which in 1737 introduced the licensing system. The Shakespearian drama, it is true, was coming into popularity with the help of Fielding"s great friend, Garrick; but no new Shakespeare appeared to write modern _Hamlets_ and _Oth.e.l.los_; Johnson tried to supply his place with the ponderous _Irene_, and John Home followed with _Douglas_ of "My name is Norval" fame. The tragedies were becoming more dreary. Characteristic of Fielding was his admiration of Lillo, whose _George Barnwell_ (1730) and _Fatal Curiosity_ (about 1736), the last of them brought out under Fielding"s own management, were remarkable attempts to revive tragedies by going to real life. It is plain, however, that the theatre is no longer the appropriate organ of the reading cla.s.ses. The licensing act seems to have expressed the general feeling which, if we call it Puritan, must be Puritan in a sense which described the general middle-cla.s.s prejudices. The problem which Fielding had to solve was to find a literary form which should meet the tastes of the new public, who could not be drawn to the theatre, and which yet should have some of the characteristics which had hitherto been confined to the dramatic form. That was the problem which was triumphantly solved by _Tom Jones_. The story is no longer a mere series of adventures, such as that which happened to Crusoe or Gil Blas, connected by the fact that they happen to the same person; nor a prolonged religious or moral tract, showing how evil will be punished and virtue rewarded. It implies a dramatic situation which can be developed without being hampered by the necessities of stage-representation; and which can give full scope to a realistic portrait of nature as it is under all the familiar circ.u.mstances of time and place. This novel, which fulfilled those conditions, has ever since continued to flourish; although a long time was to elapse before any one could approach the merits of the first inventor. In all ages, I suppose, the great artist, whether dramatist or epic poet or novelist, has more or less consciously had the aim which Fielding implicitly claims for himself; that is, to portray human nature. Every great artist, again, must, in one sense, be thoroughly "realistic." The word has acquired an irrelevant connotation: but I mean that his vision of the world must correspond to the genuine living convictions of his time. He only ceases to be a realist in that wide sense of the word when he deliberately affects beliefs which have lost their vitality and uses the old mythology, for example, as convenient machinery, when it has ceased to have any real hold upon the minds of their contemporaries. So far Defoe and Richardson and Fielding were perfectly right and deservedly successful because they described the actual human beings whom they saw before them, instead of regarding a setting forth of plain facts as something below the dignity of the artist. Every new departure in literature thrives in proportion as it abandons the old conventions which have become mere survivals. Each of them, in his way, felt the need of appealing to the new cla.s.s of readers by direct portraiture of the readers themselves, Fielding"s merit is his thorough appreciation of this necessity. He will give you men as he sees them, with perfect impartiality and photographic accuracy. His hearty appreciation of genuine work is characteristic. He admires Lillo, as I have said, for giving George Barnwell instead of the conventional stage hero; and his friend Hogarth, who was in pictorial art what he was in fiction, and paints the "Rake"s Progress" without bothering about old masters or the grand style; and he is enthusiastic about Garrick because he makes Hamlet"s fear of the ghost so natural that Partridge takes it for a mere matter of course. Downright, forcible appeals to fact--contempt for the artificial and conventional--are his strength, though they also imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the "good buffalo," as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous ma.s.s of roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coa.r.s.e and materialistic. That corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet corresponded to a vague feeling after a real element of interest. But, in truth, our criticism, I think, applies as much to Richardson as to Fielding. Realism, taken in what I should call the right sense, is not properly opposed to "idealism"; it points to one of the two poles towards which all literary art should be directed. The artist is a realist so far as he deals with the actual life and the genuine beliefs of his time; but he is an idealist so far as he sees the most essential facts and utters the deepest and most permanent truths in his own dialect. His work should be true to life and give the essence of actual human nature, and also express emotions and thoughts common to the men of all times. Now that is the weak side of the fiction of this period.

We may read _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_ with unstinted admiration; but we feel that we are in a confined atmosphere. There are regions of thought and feeling which seem to lie altogether beyond their province. Fielding, in his way, was a bit of a philosopher, though he is too much convinced that Locke and Hoadley have said the last words in theology and philosophy. Parson Adams is a most charming person in his way, but his intellectual outlook is decidedly limited. That may not trouble us much; but we have also the general feeling that we are living in a little provincial society which somehow takes its own special arrangements to be part of the eternal order of nature. The worthy Richardson is aware that there are a great many rakes and infamous persons about; but it never occurs to him that there can be any speculation outside the Thirty-nine Articles; and though Fielding perceives a great many abuses in the actual administration of the laws and the political system, he regards the social order, with its squires and parsons and attorneys as the only conceivable state of things. In other words they, and I might add their successor Smollett, represent all the prejudices and narrow a.s.sumptions of the quiet, respectable, and in many ways worthy and domestically excellent, middle-cla.s.s of the day; which, on the whole, is determined not to look too deeply into awkward questions, but to go along st.u.r.dily working out its own conceptions and plodding along on well-established lines.

Another literary movement is beginning which is to lead to the sense of this deficiency. The n.o.bleman, growing rich and less absorbed in the political world, has time and leisure to cultivate his tastes, becomes, as I have said, a dilettante, and sends his son to make the grand tour as a regular part of his education.

Prev List Next