the most seducing and the most formidable of all powers. No! human nature is not so formed; nor shall we improve the faculties or better the morals of public men by our possession of the most infallible receipt in the world for making cheats and hypocrites.

Let me say, with plainness, I who am no longer in a public character, that if by a fair, by an indulgent, by a gentlemanly behaviour to our representatives, we do not give confidence to their minds, and a liberal scope to their understandings; if we do not permit our members to act upon a very enlarged view of things, we shall at length infallibly degrade our national representation into a confused and scuffling bustle of local agency. When the popular member is narrowed in his ideas, and rendered timid in his proceedings, the service of the crown will be the sole nursery of statesmen. Among the frolics of the court it may at length take that of attending to its business. Then the monopoly of mental power will be added to the power of all other kinds it possesses. On the side of the people there will be nothing but impotence; for ignorance is impotence; narrowness of mind is impotence; timidity is itself impotence, and makes all other qualities that go along with it impotent and useless.

At present it is the plan of the court to make its servants insignificant. If the people should fall into the same humour, and should choose their servants on the same principles of mere obsequiousness and flexibility, and total vacancy or indifference of opinion in all public matters, then no part of the state will be sound; and it will be in vain to think of saving it.

CHAPTER VII

NOVELISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY

THE general tone and temper of our literature during the eighteenth century were particularly favourable to the growth of the novel. It was preeminently an age of reason and observation, of lucid judgement and insight, an age to which the proper study of mankind is man', intolerant of mysticism, suspicious of enthusiasm, less intent on the contemplation of ideals than on the direct expression of human life. Pope's Rape of the Lock is animated by the spirit of the novel, so are Addison's papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, so are Goldsmith's on Beau Tibbs: in all alike the author presents, narrates, depicts, creating a character which is not wholly his own, and looking through its eyes at the changing world of experience. In our seventeenthcentury writings we touch at first hand the personality of the author; in those of the period which followed we often see it projected across an intervening medium.

Defoe, from whom the eighteenth-century novel may be said to take its origin, is curiously impersonal. He becomes in turn Robinson Crusoe or Captain Singleton or Moll Flanders: he enters into their feelings, he describes their careers, he records their adventures with the dispassionate accuracy of the chronicler. Contrast him with Nashe, his last predecessor in the picaresque novel. Nashe is always standing aloof from the story, confiding in the reader, drawing attention to his wit or his judgement or his power of description. Defoe tells

you the event exactly as it happened; you take his fiction for an historical occurrence, you determine its chronology, you follow it upon the map, you wonder that the official annalists have omitted to mention it. If this be realism, Defoe is the first of realists, the earliest author who has made an imaginary world seem wholly familiar. With Bunyan we are always conscious of the allegory, with Swift of the ironic intention; Defoe tells us a traveller's tale, and we accept it for matter of fact.

Not less remarkable, in another field, is the genius of Richardson. The little precise bookseller who looked out on the street from his shop window and was too ignorant of life to invent a situation showed the most astonishing power of realizing and expressing certain general types of human feeling. The plot of Clarissa is frankly impossible: Mr. Henry Fielding, the Middlesex magistrate, would have laid Lovelace by the heels before the story was half through; but the dramatis personae are beyond all praise. Clarissa herself is one of the greatest of English heroines; she ranks with Elizabeth Bennet and with Clara Middleton: we can almost subscribe to the tear-stained letters which, as the book drew near its close, entreated that her life might be spared. Miss Howe is the most charming and sympathetic of confidantes; Lovelace himself is so human a villain that one wonders how Richardson contrived to know him so well. And the whole story, for all its length, is told in an easy-flowing style which never flags or falters or hesitates, which keeps the attention entranced, which is lightened with true humour and touched with genuine pathos. Of Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison there is less need to speak: the one is too uniformly humble, the other too uniformly magnanimous to retain the interest of the reader. But Clarissa is an unquestioned masterpiece. We

may hesitate to follow Diderot, who ranked it beside Shakespeare; we cannot refuse to award it a prominent place in the forefront of English fiction.

Critics are accustomed to smile at the sentiment' of the eighteenth century, to regard it as a morbid growth in 'an age of reason and common sense'. But the truth is that it only concentrated a feeling which in the nineteenth century became diffused. Sterne is as natural a product of his time as Rousseau each no doubt is self-conscious, because each represents an isolated tendency, but the tendency is a true and integral part of human nature as a whole. And with Sterne the sentiment is qualified and leavened with its most natural counterpart, the sense of humour. Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are as much his children as Maria of Moulines: the lines are drawn with a hand too well aware of its grace; but though the phrase is artificial, the feeling that underlies it is true. We may grant a certain freakishness, a momentary impulse to 'throw his periwig in the face of his audience': there is in all his work a want of dignity and reserve of artistic conscience and rectitude. But the fact remains that he has helped us to the understanding of human nature, and that, while he is the most subjective of eighteenth-century novelists, he has widened our outlook and enlarged our sympathies.

Fielding and Smollett are often classed together as writers of a more masculine vein. But in essentials they have few points of resemblance. Smollett is careful and minute; he draws with the accuracy of a Dutch painter; his mind moves in a narrow range, though within that range he sees. everything; his humour is usually farcical, his view of life usually vulgar. Fielding, the 'prose Homer', as Byron called him, is of a far more heroic mould: epic in scale and treatment, full of a strong whole

some virility, with a keen eye, a warm heart, and a laugh that clears the air. There are coarse pages in his work, as there are in that of Chaucer or Shakespeare, but there is no touch of Smollett's vulgarity in his doctrine the unpardonable sins are malice, meanness, and hypocrisy, and if a man be honest and open-handed he shall win through.

Two other types of prose fiction remain to be considered. During the whole century there is evidence of a taste for the exotic, the heightened adventure, the remote scene: we find it in the Vision of Mirza and in Collins's Persian Eclogues; it continued until, with the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, it passed away into absurdity and extravagance. At the height of the fashion there appeared, in 1764, Walpole's Castle of Otranto. In the preface to the second edition he discusses his purpose from the same point of view which Coleridge afterwards adopted in regard to the Lyrical Ballads1: the setting is to be strange and supernatural, the emotions are to be those which, given the surroundings, men and women might be expected to feel. In contradistinction to this is the domestic novel of manners, where the whole scene is simple and familiar: a type represented to the town by Miss Burney, whose Cecilia and Evelina were at the time remarkably successful, and to the country by Oliver Goldsmith, whose Vicar of Wakefield is, in its kind, unsurpassed. From Miss Burney the line of succession ran straight to the novels of Jane Austen: Goldsmith unquestionably influenced Galt, whose Annals of the Parish were written in direct discipleship, and through him affected at second hand the domestic novels of Sir Walter Scott.

DANIEL DEFOE (1661 ?-1731) came of Nonconformist parents, and early took a warm interest in the struggle between the

1 Biographia Literaria, ch. xiv.