CHAPTER IX.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

A. D. 1702-A. D. 1800.

SECTION FIRST: THE LITERARY CHARACTER AND CHANGES OF THE PERIOD.

1. Character of the Period as a Whole-Its Relations to Our Own Time.-2. Literary Character of its First Generation-The Age of Queen Anne and George I.-3. Literary Character of its Second and Third Generations-From the Accession of George II.4. The Prose Style of the First Generation-Addison-Swift.-5. The Prose Style of the Second and Third Generations-Johnson.

1. No period in our literary history has been, at various times, estimated so variously as the Eighteenth Century. If it was overvalued by those who lived in it, it is assuredly undervalued in our day; a natural result of circumstances, but not the less a result to be regretted. In regard to ages more remote, the beautifying charm of antiquity tempts us to err, oftenest, by entertaining for their great men and great deeds, although the principles may be very unlike ours, a respect exceeding that which is their due. But the century immediately preceding our own is not far enough distant to be reverenced as ancient; while its distance is sufficient to have caused, in the modes of thinking and varieties. of taste, changes so material as to incapacitate us for sympathizing readily with its characteristics.

It is true, no doubt, that in England, as elsewhere in Europe, the temper of the eighteenth century was cold, dissatisfied, and hypercritical. Alike in the theory of literature and in that of society, in the theory of knowledge and in that of religion, old principles were peremptorily called in question; and the literary man and statesman, the philosopher and the theologian, alike found the task allotted them to be mainly that of attack or defence. It is true, likewise, that the opinions which kept the firmest hold on the minds of the nation, and the sentiments which those opinions prompted, were quite alien to the speculative or the heroic; and that they received adequate literary expression, in a philosophy which acknowledged no higher motive than utility, and in a kind of poetry which found its favourite field in didactic discussion, and sank in narrative into the comic and do

mestic. It is further true, (and it is a fact which had a very wide influence,) that, in all departments of literary composition, but most of all in poetry, the form had come to be more regarded than the matter; that melody of rhythm, and elegance of phrase, and symmetry of parts, were held to be higher excellences than rich fancy or fervid emotion.

Whatever may be the amount of likeness or unlikeness which, as a whole, this description bears to the character of our own time, it is plain, that there are points of dissimilarity, sufficient to make us look with indifference on many literary phenomena which were deeply interesting to those who first beheld them. It is certain, also, that an age like the eighteenth century could not give birth to a literature possessing the loftiest and most striking qualities, either of poetry or of eloquence. But it was an age whose monuments we cannot overlook, without losing much instruction as well as much pleasure. It increased prodigiously the knowledge previously possessed by mankind, especially in those fields which lie furthest from that of literature: it swept away a vast number of wrong opinions by which all preceding knowledge had been alloyed, and this in literature as well as in other walks of thought it produced many literary works excellent both in matter and in expression, and especially excellent in those qualities which are chiefly wanting in the literature of our time; and it exercised on the English language, partly for good and partly for evil, an influence which is shown in every sentence we now speak or write.

2. The diversities which took place in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century, diversities in opinion, in sentiment, and in taste, diversities in matter and in style, may in a general way be understood sufficiently, if we regard the whole period as portioned off into Three successive Stages, the average length of which will thus be about a generation in the life of man.

The First Generation of the time was that which is currently named from Queen Anne, but which should be taken as including also the reign of her successor. Our notion of its literary character is chiefly derived from the poetry of Pope, and the prose of Addison and his friends. It was long regarded among us as worthy to be compared with the Augustan age in the literature of Rome; and it was so compared by critics who intended thus to intimate its superiority, not only to all that had gone before, but to all that was likely to follow. There was really not a little likeness between the ancient age and the modern; and the likeness prevails especially in the tendency to didactic coldness which pervaded the writings of both, and in the anxious attention paid

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to correctness of style and formal symmetry of method. works of Virgil and his contemporaries were not the noblest efforts of the Roman mind: still less could England, which had already given birth to Chaucer and Shakspeare, to Spenser and Milton, to the Old Divines and other masters of eloquence, be believed to have reached the culminating point of her poetry in Pope's satires and didactic verses, or that of her prose in the light elegancies of the Essayists. In philosophical thinking itself, which is seldom taken into account in those popular estimates, Berkeley and Clarke, though we shall probably place them higher than Hobbes and Locke, will by few be estimated as standing above Bacon.

In its own region, a region which is not low, though a good way below the highest, the lighter and more popular section in the literature of Queen Anne's time is distinguished and valuable. The readers it addressed were sought only in the upper ranks of society; and the success which attended its teaching was equally honourable to the instructors and beneficial to the pupils. Its lessons were full of good sense and correct taste; they insinuated as much information as an audience chiefly composed of fashionable or literary idlers could be expected to accept; and, never affecting imaginative or impassioned flights that were alike beyond the sphere of the teachers and that of the taught, they were generally pervaded by right and amiable feelings, and by welldirected though not widely-reaching sympathies. As literary artists, those writers attained an excellence as eminent as any that can be reached by art, when it is neither inspired by enthusiastic genius, nor employed on majestic themes; but an excellence which, through the want of such inspiration and such topics, was of a negative rather than a positive cast. Subjecting themselves cordially to the laws of that French school of criticism, of which Dryden and his contemporaries had been in part disciples, they exhibited, perhaps more thoroughly than the literary men of Louis the Fourteenth's court, the results to which those laws tend and their polish, and grace, and sensitive refinement of taste, were accompanied in not a few of them, and in some quite overpowered, by a national and masculine vigour, of which the French courtliterature was altogether destitute. In its moral tone, again, the early part of the eighteenth century, actually much better than the age before it, communicated a better tone to its literature. It is much purer, at least, if not always so lofty as we might wish to see it.

3. The Second Generation of the century may be reckoned, loosely, as contained in the reign of George the Second. It was a time inferior to that of Queen Anne for care and skill in the

details of literary composition; but it was much more remarkable, in almost all departments of literature, for vigour of thinking, for variety and ingenuity in the treatment of themes, and for the exhibition, in not a few quarters, of genuine poetic fancy and susceptibility. The clearer accents in which poetry began to speak, awakened, doubtless, no more than faint echoes in the minds of the listeners; but the efforts of the seekers after truth, not being too ambitious for the temper of the time, were, on the whole, justly appreciated.

Samuel Johnson, entering on his toils soon after the beginning of this period, had produced his principal works before its close; although his influence, whether on thinking or on style, was not matured till later. In singular contrast to his writings, stand those of the novelists: Richardson alone having anything in common with him; while Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, are equally distant from the dignified pomp of his manner, and from the ascetic elevation of his morality. It deserves to be remembered, too, that a more solemn spirit was beginning to be prevalent in thinking; and that, in the same generation with the looseness of the novels and the scepticism of Hume, the manly reasoning of Butler was employed in defence of sacred truth, and the stern dissent of Wesley and Whitefield was entered against religious deadness. Poetry began to stir with a new life. Johnson himself belonged essentially, in his versified compositions, to the school of Pope; but a nobler ambition animated Young and Akenside, and a finer poetic sense was perceptible in Thomson, Gray, and Collins.

About the accession of George the Third, we may conveniently consider ourselves as entering on a new development of literary elements, and as approaching, with accelerated rapidity, the state of things which arose about the close of the century.

This Third Generation of the eighteenth century was by no means so fertile in literary genius as either of the other two. But some of the men who were its sons were very richly gifted; and the tone both of thinking and of feeling was such as we can readily sympathize with. The earliest of its remarkable writers were the historians, headed by Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon; writers whose works, some of them defective as records of truth, have hardly ever been exceeded as literary compositions of their class. In philosophical thinking, the efforts were both active and varied. They embraced ethics in Paley and Adam Smith; the theory of public wealth in the great work of the latter of those two; psychology and metaphysics in Reid and the other founders of the Scottish school. Criticism, conducted by Johnson during

his old age in the narrow spirit which he had learnt in youth, was now called on to give account of its principles; and poetry began -to traverse paths which she had long deserted, with some which she had never trodden before. In the roll of the pocts who adorned those forty years, we read successively the names of Goldsmith, Cowper, and Burns.

4. There is one feature of our literature on which the influence of the eighteenth century has been great and permanent, namely, the character of our Prose Style. In the course of that time, there were formed two dissimilar manners of writing, each of which has contributed towards the formation of all that is distinctive in our more modern forms of expression. The earlier of those manners we may understand by studying the language of Addison, or still better by comparing his with that of Swift. The later of the two is instanced most distinctly in the language of Johnson; if indeed we should not rather consider him as carrying its peculiarities to excess.

In style, as in so much else, the writers of Queen Anne's time pursued the track of their predecessors, but cultivated successfully the ground on which the latter had done only the rough work of pioneers. Dryden and his followers had cleared away, almost entirely, the quaintness and pedantry of the times preceding the Restoration, and had written with neatness or attained elegance whenever they wrote with care. But there was in all of them an inclination to looseness of structure and meanness of phrase, which, in the more hasty writers, degenerated, as it has aptly been said, into what we now call slang.

Addison and his friends aimed assiduously at rising above this, yet without rising higher than the ordinary language of refined social life. Their great merit of style consisted in their correct knowledge and accurate reproduction of those genuine idiomatic peculiarities of our speech, which had been received into the conversation of intelligent and instructed men. They wrote such English as an accomplished person of their day would naturally have spoken. This is true of all of them, though most emphatically so of Addison. It is true of Swift himself, whose worst coarseness of manner hardly ever betrays him into offensive coarseness of expression. Yet there are great diversities among them; and these two leaders of the band furnish apt instances of the extremes. Addison being admirable for ease and grace, but sometimes feeble through fastidiousness; Swift being often clumsy, but always vigorous and pointed, and presenting a greater stock of good and familiar words and idioms than any other writer in our language.