Halleck's New English Literature

Swift's wit frequently left its imprint on the thought of the time. The results of this special prank with the astrologer were: first, to cause the wits of the town to join in the hue and cry that Partridge was dead; second, to increase the contempt for astrologers; and, third, in the words of Scott: "The most remarkable consequence of Swift's frolic was the establishment of the Tatler." Richard Steele, its founder, adopted the popular name of Isaac Bickerstaff.

Taine says of Swift: "He is the inventor of irony, as Shakespeare of poetry." The most powerful instance of Swift's irony is shown in his attempt to better the condition of the Irish, whose poverty forced them to let their children grow up ignorant and destitute, or often even die of starvation. His Modest Proposal for relieving such distress is to have the children at the age of one year served as a new dish on the tables of the great. So apt is irony to be misunderstood and to fail of its mark, that for a time Swift was considered merely brutal; but soon he convinced the Irish that he was their friend, willing to contribute both time and money to aid them. His ironical remarks on The Abolishing of Christianity were also misunderstood.

His poems, such as A Description of a City Shower, and Cadenus and Vanessa, show the same general characteristics as his prose, but are inferior to it.

We shall search Swift's work in vain for examples of pathos or sublimity. We shall find his pages caustic with wit, satire, and irony, and often disfigured with coarseness. One of the great pessimists of all time, he is yet tremendously in earnest in whatever he says, from his Drapier's Letters, written to protect Ireland from the schemes of English politicians, to his Gulliver's Travels, where he describes the court of Lilliput. This earnestness and circumstantial minuteness throw an air of reality around his most grotesque creations. He pretended to despise Defoe; yet the influence of that great writer, who made fiction seem as real as fact, is plainly apparent in Gulliver's remarkable adventures.

Although sublimity and pathos are outside of his range, his style is remarkably well adapted to his special subject matter. While reading his works, one scarcely ever thinks of his style, unless the attention is specially directed to it. Only a great artist can thus conceal his art. A style so natural as this has especial merits which will repay study. Three of its chief characteristics are simplicity, flexibility, and energetic directness.

JOSEPH ADDISON, 1672-1719

[Illustration: JOSEPH ADDISON. From the painting by Sir Godfrey
Kneller, National Portrait Gallery.]

[Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF ADDISON.]

Life.—Joseph Addison was born in the paternal rectory at Milston, a small village in the eastern part of Wiltshire. He was educated at Oxford. He intended to become a clergyman, but, having attracted attention by his graceful Latin poetry, was dissuaded by influential court friends from entering the service of the church. They persuaded him to fit himself for the diplomatic service, and secured for him a yearly pension of £300. He then went to France, studied the language of that country, and traveled extensively, so as to gain a knowledge of foreign courts. The death of King William in 1702 stopped his pension, however, and Addison was forced to return to England to seek employment as a tutor.

The great battle of Blenheim was won by Marlborough in 1704. As Macaulay says, the ministry was mortified to see such a victory celebrated by so much bad poetry, and he instances these lines from one of the poems:

  "Think of two thousand gentlemen at least,
  And each man mounted on his capering beast;
  Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer went to Addison's humble lodgings and asked him to write a poem in honor of the battle. Addison took the town by storm with a simile in which the great general was likened to the calm angel of the whirlwind. When people reflected how calmly Marlborough had directed the whirlwind of war, they thought that no comparison could be more felicitous. From that time Addison's fortunes rose. Since his day no man relying on literary talents alone has risen so high in state affairs. He was made assistant Secretary of State, Secretary for Ireland, and finally chief Secretary of State.

Though Addison was a prominent figure in the political world, it is his literary life that most concerns us. In his prime he wrote for The Tatler and The Spectator, famous newspapers of Queen Anne's day, many inimitable essays on contemporary life and manners. Most newspaper work is soon forgotten, but these essays are read by the most cultivated people of to-day. In his own age his most meritorious production was thought to be the dull tragedy of Cato, a drama observing the classical unities. Some of his Hymns are much finer. Lines like these, written of the stars, linger in our memories:—

"Forever singing as they shine,
The hand that made us is divine."

Addison had a singularly pleasing personality. Though he was a Whig, the Tories admired and applauded him. He was a good illustration of the truth that if one smiles in the mirror of the world, it will answer him with a smile. Swift said he believed the English would have made Addison king, if they had been requested to place him on the throne. Pope's jealous nature prompted him to quarrel with Addison, but the quarrel was chiefly on one side. Men like Macaulay and Thackeray have exerted their powers to do justice to the kindliness and integrity of Addison.

Addison died at the age of forty-seven, and was buried in Westminster
Abbey.

[Illustration: RICHARD STEELE.]

Collaborates with Steele.—Under the pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Richard Steele (1672-1729), a former schoolmate and friend of Addison, started in 1709 The Tatler, a periodical published three times a week. This discussed matters of interest in society and politics, and occasionally published an essay on morals and manners. Steele was a good-natured, careless individual, with a varied experience as soldier, playwright, moralist, keeper of the official gazette, and pensioner. He says that he always "preferred the state of his mind to that of his fortune"; but his mental state was often fickle, and too much dependent on bodily luxuries, though he was patriotic enough to sacrifice his personal fortune for what he considered his country's interest.

We find Addison a frequent contributor to The Tatler after its seventeenth number. Steele says: "I fared like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbor to his aid; I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him."

The Tatler was discontinued in 1711, and Steele projected the more famous Spectator two months later. Addison wrote the first number, but the second issue, which came from Steele's pen, contains sketches of those characters which have become famous in the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. Steele's first outline of Sir Roger is a creation of sweetness and light:—

"His tenants grow rich, his servants look satisfied, all the young women profess to love him, and the young men are glad of his company. When he comes into a house he calls the servants by their names, and talks all the way upstairs to a visit."

The influence of such a character must have been especially wholesome on the readers of the eighteenth century. Without the suggestive originality of Steele, we might never have had those essays of Addison, which we read most to-day; but while Steele should have full credit for the first bold sketches, the finished portraits in the De Coverley gallery are due to Addison. Steele says of his associate, "I claim to myself the merit of having extorted excellent productions from a person of the greatest abilities, who would not have let them appear by any other means."

It is well, however, to remember that Steele did much more work than is popularly supposed. Beginning with March 1, 1711, there were 555 issues of The Spectator published on succeeding week days. To these were added 80 more numbers at irregular intervals. Of these 635 numbers, Steele wrote 236 and Addison 274.

In many respects each seemed to be the complement of the other. Steele's writings have not the polish or delicate humor of Addison's, but they have more strength and pathos. Addison had the greater genius, and he was also more willing to spend time in polishing his prose and making it artistic. From the far greater interest now shown in Addison, the student should be impressed by the necessity of artistic finish as well as of excellence in subject matter.

Addison's Essays—The greatest of Addison's Essays appeared in The Spectator and charmed many readers in Queen Anne's age. The subject matter of these Essays is extremely varied. On one day there is a pleasant paper on witches; on another, a chat about the new woman; on another, a discourse on clubs. Addison is properly a moral satirist, and his pen did much more than the pulpit to civilize the age and make virtue the fashion. In The Spectator, he says: "If I meet with anything in city, court, or country, that shocks modesty or good manners, I shall use my utmost endeavors to make an example of it." He accomplished his purpose, not by heated denunciations of vice, but by holding it up to kindly ridicule. He remembered the fable of the different methods employed by the north wind and the sun to make a man lay aside an ugly cloak.

Addison stated also that one of his objects was to bring "philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea tables and coffeehouses." His papers on Milton did much to diminish that great poet's unpopularity in an age that loved form rather than matter, art rather than natural strength.

The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers.—The most famous of Addison's productions are his papers that appeared in The Spectator, describing a typical country gentleman, Sir Roger de Coverley, and his friends and servants. Taine says that Addison here invented the novel without suspecting it. This is an overstatement; but these papers certainly have the interest of a novel from the moment Sir Roger appears until his death, and the delineation of character is far in advance of that shown in the majority of modern novels. We find ourselves rereading the De Coverley Papers more than once, a statement that can be made of but few novels.

[Illustration: SIR ROGER IN CHURCH. From a drawing by B.
Westmacott.]

General Characteristics.—Addison ranks among the greatest of English essayists. Some of his essays, like the series on Paradise Lost, deal with literary criticism; but most people to-day read little from his pen except the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, which give interesting pictures of eighteenth-century life and manners.

Before we have read many of Addison's essays, we shall discover that he is a humorist of high rank. His humor is of the kind that makes one smile, rather than laugh aloud. Our countenance relaxes when we discover that his rules for an eighteenth-century club prescribe a fine for absence except in case of sickness or imprisonment. We are quietly amused at such touches as this in the delineation of Sir Roger:—

"As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them in very good order, and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides himself; for, if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it, he stands up and looks about him, and, if he sees anybody else nodding, either wakes them himself, or sends his servants to them."

Addison is remarkable among a satiric group of writers because he intended his humor to be "remedial,"—not merely to inflict wounds, but to exert a moral influence, to induce human beings to forsake the wrong and to become more kindly. We may smile at Sir Roger; but we have more respect for his kindliness, after reading in Spectator No. 383, how he selected his boatmen to row him on the Thames:—

"We were no sooner come to the Temple Stairs, but we were surrounded with a crowd of watermen, offering us their respective services. Sir Roger, after having looked about him very attentively, spied one with a wooden leg, and immediately gave him orders to get his boat ready. As we were walking towards it, 'You must know,' says Sir Roger, 'I never make use of anybody to row me, that has not either lost a leg or an arm. I would rather bate him a few strokes of his oar than not employ an honest man that had been wounded in the Queen's service. If I was a lord or a bishop, and kept a barge, I would not put a fellow in my livery that had not a wooden leg.'"

Such humor, which finds its chief point in a desire to make the world kindlier, must have appealed to the eighteenth century, or The Spectator could not have reached a circulation of ten thousand copies a day. Addison would not now have his legion of warm admirers if his humor had been personal, like Pope's, or misanthropical, like Swift's.

Of his style, Dr. Samuel Johnson says, "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison." Benjamin Franklin, as we know from his Autobiography, followed this advice with admirable results. Addison's style seems as natural and easy as the manners of a well-bred person. When we have given some attention to dissecting his style, we may indeed discover that a prose model for to-day should have more variety and energy and occasionally more precision; but such a conclusion does not mean that any writer of this century would like the task of surpassing the De Coverley Papers.

ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744

[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. From the portrait by William
Hoare.]

Life.—Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. His father, a devout Catholic, was a linen merchant, who gave his son little formal schooling, but allowed him to pick up his education by reading such authors as pleased his fancy.

He was a very precocious child. At the age of twelve he was writing an Ode on Solitude. He chose his vocation early, for writing poetry was the business of his life.

In his childhood, his parents removed from London to Binfield, a village in Berkshire, nine miles from Windsor. When he was nearly thirty years old, his translation of the Iliad enabled him to buy a house and grounds at Twickenham on the Thames, about twelve miles above London. He lived here for the rest of his life, indulging his taste for landscape gardening and entertaining the greatest men of the age.

After early middle life, his writings made him pecuniarily independent, but he suffered much from ill health. In his Lives of the English Poets, Dr. Samuel Johnson says of Pope:—

"By natural deformity, or accidental distortion, his vital functions were so much disordered that his life was a long disease… When he rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce able to hold himself erect till they were laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings…

"In all his intercourse with mankind, he had great delight in artifice, and endeavored to attain all his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods. He hardly drank tea without a stratagem."

The publication of his correspondence tangled him in a mesh of deceptions, because his desire to appear in a favorable light led him to change letters that he had sent to friends. His double-dealing, intense jealousy, and irritability, due to his physical condition, caused him to become involved in many quarrels, which gave him the opportunity to indulge to the utmost his own satiric tendency. In one of his late satires, The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he charged Addison with the inclination to—

"Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."

On the basis of what he wrote, we may divide his life into three periods. During his first thirty years, he produced various kinds of verse, like the Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. The middle period of his life was marked by his translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. In his third period, he wrote moral and didactic poems, like the Essay on Man, and satires, like the Dunciad.

[Illustration: POPE'S VILLA AT TWICKENHAM. From an old print.]

Some Poems of the First Period: Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock.—Pope's first published poem, The Pastorals, which appeared in 1709, was followed in 1711 by An Essay on Criticism,—an exquisite setting of a number of gems of criticism which had for a long time been current. Pope's intention in writing this poem may be seen from what he himself says: "It seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest."

From this point of view, the poem is remarkable. No other writer, except Shakespeare, has in an equal number of lines said so many things which have passed into current quotation. Rare perfection in the form of statement accounts for this. The poem abounds in such lines as these:—

"For fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

"To err is human, to forgive divine."

"All seems infected that th' infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye."

  "In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
  Alike fantastic if too new or old:
  Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
  Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

The Rape of the Lock, which is Pope's masterpiece, is almost a romantic poem, even though it is written in classical couplets. It was a favorite with Oliver Goldsmith, and James Russell Lowell rightly say says: "The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote." The poem is a mock epic, and it has the supernatural machinery which was supposed to be absolutely necessary for an epic. In place of the gods and goddesses of the great epics, however, the fairy-like sylphs help to guide the action of this poem.

The poem, which is founded on an actual incident, describes a young lord's theft of a lock of hair from the head of a court beauty. Pope composed The Rape of the Lock to soothe her indignation and to effect a reconciliation. The whole of this poem should be read by the student, as it is a vivid satiric picture of fashionable life in Queen Anne's reign.

[Illustration: RAPE OF THE LOCK. From a drawing by B. Westmacott.]

Translation of Homer.—Pope's chief work during the middle period of his life was his translation of the Iliad and of the Odyssey of Homer. From a financial point of view, these translations were the most successful of his labors. They brought him in nearly £9000, and made him independent of bookseller or of nobleman.

The remarkable success of these works is strange when we remember that Pope's knowledge of Greek was very imperfect, and that he was obliged to consult translations before attempting any passage. The Greek scholar Bentley, a contemporary of Pope, delivered a just verdict on the translation: "A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." The historian Gibbon said that the poem had every merit except faithfulness to the original.

Homer is simple and direct. He abounds in concrete terms. Pope dislikes a simple term and loves a circumlocution and an abstraction. We have the concrete "herd of swine" translated into "a bristly care," "skins," into "furry spoils." The concrete was considered common and undignified. Homer says in simple language: "His father wept with him," but Pope translates this: "The father poured a social flood."

Pope used to translate thirty or forty verses of the Iliad before rising, and then to spend a considerable time in polishing them. But half of the translation of the Odyssey is his own work. He employed assistants to finish the other half; but it is by no means easy to distinguish his work from theirs.

[Illustration: ALEXANDER POPE. From contemporary portrait.]

Some Poems of his Third Period: "Essay on Man," and "Satires."—The Essay on Man is a philosophical poem with the avowed object of vindicating the ways of God to man. The entire poem is an amplification of the idea contained in these lines:—

  "All nature is but art unknown to thee;
  All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
  All discord, harmony not understood;
  All partial evil, universal good.
  And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
  One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."

The chief merit of the poem consists in throwing into polished form many of the views current at the time, so that they may be easily understood. Before we read very far we come across such old acquaintances as—

"The proper study of mankind is man."

"An honest man's the noblest work of God."

  "Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
  As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
  Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
  We first endure, then pity, then embrace."

The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and The Dunciad are Pope's greatest satires. In The Dunciad, an epic of the dunces, he holds up to ridicule every person and writer who had offended him. These were in many cases scribblers who had no business with a pen; but in a few instances they were the best scholars of that day. A great deal of the poem is now very tiresome reading. Much of it is brutal. Pope was a powerful agent, as Thackeray says, in rousing that obloquy which has ever since pursued a struggling author. The Dunciad could be more confidently consulted about contemporary literary history, if Pope had avoided such unnecessary misstatements as:—

"Earless on high, stood unabash'd De Foe."

This line is responsible for the current unwarranted belief that the author of Robinson Crusoe lost his ears in the pillory.

General Characteristics.—-Pope has not strong imagination, a keen feeling for nature, or wide sympathy with man. Leslie Stephen says: "Pope never crosses the undefinable, but yet ineffaceable line, which separates true poetry from rhetoric." The debate in regard to whether Pope's verse is ever genuine poetry may not yet be settled to the satisfaction of all; but it is well to recognize the undoubted fact that his couplets still appeal to many readers who love clearness and precision and who are not inclined to wrestle with the hidden meaning of greater poetry. One of his poems, The Rape of the Lock, has become almost a universal favorite because of its humor, good-natured satire, and entertaining pictures of society in Queen Anne's time.

He is the poet who best expresses the classical spirit of the eighteenth century. He excels in satiric and didactic verse. He expresses his ideas in perfect form, and embodies them in classical couplets, sometimes styled "rocking-horse meter"; but he shows no power of fathoming the emotional depths of the soul.

In the history of literature, he holds an important place, because, more than any other writer, he calls attention to the importance of correctness of form and of careful expression. He is the prince of artificial poets. Though he erred in exalting form above matter, he taught his age the needed lesson of careful workmanship.

SUMMARY

The Restoration and the first part of the eighteenth century display a low moral standard in both church and state. This standard had its effect on literature. The drama shows marked decline. We find no such sublime outbursts of song as characterize the Elizabethan and Puritan ages. The writers chose satiric or didactic subjects, and avoided pathos, deep feeling, and sublimity. French influence was paramount.

The classical school, which loved polished regularity, set the fashion in literature. An old idea, dressed in exquisite form, was as welcome as a new one. Anything strange, irregular, romantic, full of feeling, highly imaginative, or improbable to the intellect, was unpopular. Even in Gulliver's Travels, Swift endeavored to be as realistic as if he were demonstrating a geometrical proposition.

Dryden and Pope are the two chief poets of the classical school. Both use the riming couplet and are distinguished for their satiric and didactic verse. Their poetry shows more intellectual brilliancy than imaginative power. They display little sympathy with man and small love for nature.

The age is far more remarkable for its prose than for its poetry. French influence helped to develop a concise, flexible, energetic prose style. The deterioration in poetry was partly compensated for by the rapid advances in prose, which needed the influences working toward artistic finish. Because of its cleverness, avoidance of long sentences, and of classical inversions, Dryden's prose is essentially modern. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is the world's most popular story of adventure, told in simple and direct, but seemingly artless, prose. Of all the prose writers since Swift's time, few have equaled him and still fewer surpassed him in simplicity, flexibility, directness, and lack of affectation. The essays of Steele and Addison constitute a landmark. No preceding English prose shows so much grace of style, delicate humor, and power of awakening and retaining interest as do the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers.

The influence of this age was sufficient to raise permanently the standard level of artistic literary expression. The unpruned, shapeless, and extravagant forms of earlier times will no longer be tolerated.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

An account of the history of this period may be found in either Gardiner,[3] Green, Walker, or Cheney. Vols. VIII. and IX. of the Political History of England give the history in greater detail. For the social side, consult Traill, Vols. IV. and V., and Cheney's Industrial and Social History of England. Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century is an excellent work.

LITERARY

The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vols. VIII., IX., X.

Courthope's A History of English Poetry, Vols. III., IV., and V.

Stephen's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century.

Taine's History of English Literature, Book III., Chaps. I., II.,
III.

Gosse's History of Eighteenth Century Literature begins with 1660.

Garnett's The Age of Dryden.

Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. I.

Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature.

Saintsbury's Life of Dryden. (E.M.L.)

Macaulay's Essay on Dryden.

Lowell's Essay on Dryden in Among My Books.

Dryden's Essays on the Drama, edited by Strunk.

Fowler's Life of Locke. (E.M.L.)

Stephen's History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century.

Dennis's The Age of Pope.

Thackeray's English Humorists (Swift, Addison, Steele, Pope).

Stephen's Life of Swift. (E.M.L.)

Craik's Life of Swift.

Courthope's Life of Addison. (E.M.L.)

Macaulay's Essay on Addison.

Stephen's Life of Pope. (E.M.L.)

De Quincey's Essay on Pope, and On the Poetry of Pope.

Johnson's Lives of the Poets (Dryden, Pope, Addison).

Lowell's My Study Windows (Pope).

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER VI:

[Footnote 1: Essay on Criticism, lines 297, 298.]

[Footnote 2: For a list of the chief dramatists of the Restoration and their best work, see p. 626.]

[Footnote 3: For full titles, see p. 50.]

[Footnote 4: For full titles, see p. 6.]

CHAPTER VII: THE SECOND FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1740-1780

The Colonial Expansion of England.—The most important movements in English history during the second forty years of the eighteenth century are connected with colonial expansion. In 1739 friction between England and Spain over colonial trade forced Robert Walpole, the prime minister, into a war which was not successfully prosecuted, and which compelled him to resign in 1742. The humorous statement that he "abdicated," contains a large element of truth, for he had been a much more important ruler than the king. The contest with Spain was merged in the unprofitable war of the Austrian Succession (1740-1778), in which England participated.

The successors of Walpole were weak and inefficient; but in 1757 William Pitt, the Elder (1708-1778), although merely secretary of state, obtained the ascendancy in the government. Walpole had tried in vain to bribe Pitt, who was in politics the counterpart of Wesley in religious life. Pitt appealed to the patriotism and to the sense of honor of his countrymen, and his appeal was heard. His enthusiasm and integrity, coupled with good judgment of men, enabled him to lead England to become the foremost power of the world.

France had managed her colonial affairs in America and in India so well that it seemed as if she might in both places displace England. Pitt, however, selected good leaders and planned a comprehensive method of warfare against France, both in Europe and in the colonies. Between 1750 and 1760 Clive was making Great Britain mistress of the vast empire of India. The French and Indian War (1754-1760) in America resulted in favor of England. In 1759 Wolfe shattered the power of France in Canada, which has since remained an English colony. England was expanding to the eastward and the westward and taking her literature with her. As Wolfe advanced on Quebec, he was reading Gray's Elegy.

At the beginning of this century England owned one half of the island of Great Britain and a few colonial settlements. Not until 1707 were England and Scotland united. In 1763 England had vast dominions in North America and India. She had become the greatest colonial power in the world.

The New Religious Influence.—England could not have taken such a commanding position unless the patriotism and morals of her citizens had improved since the beginning of the century. The church had become too lukewarm and respectable to bring in the masses, who saw more to attract them in taverns and places of public amusement.

When religious influence was at the lowest ebb, two eloquent preachers, John Wesley and George Whitefield, started a movement which is still gathering force. Wesley did not ask his audience to listen to a sermon on the favorite bloodless abstractions of the eighteenth-century pulpit, such as Charity, Faith, Duty, Holiness, —abstractions which never moved a human being an inch heavenward. His sermons were emotional. They dealt largely with the emotion of love,—God's love for man.

He did not ask his listeners to engage in intellectual disquisitions about the aspects of infinity: He did not preach free-will metaphysics or trouble his hearers with a satisfactory philosophical account of the origin of evil. He spoke about things that reached not only the understanding but also the feelings of plain men.

About the same time, Whitefield was preaching to the miners near Bristol. As he eloquently told them the story of salvation he brought tears to the eyes of these rude men and made many resolve to lead better lives.

This religious awakening may have been accompanied with too much appeal to the feelings and unhealthy emotional excitement; but some vigorous movement was absolutely necessary to quicken the spiritual life of a decadent age.

The American Revolution.—The second forty years of the eighteenth century witnessed another movement of great importance to the world,—the revolt of the American colonies (1775). When George III. (1760-1820) came to the throne, he determined to be the real ruler of his kingdom,—to combine in himself the offices of king, prime minister, and cabinet. He undertook to coerce public opinion at home and abroad. He repeatedly offended the American colonies by attempts to tax them and to regulate their trade. They rebelled in 1775 and signed their Declaration of Independence in 1776. Under the leadership of George Washington, and with the help of France, they achieved their independence. The battle of Yorktown (1781), won by Washington and the French navy, was the last important battle of the American Revolution. In spite of her great loss, England still retained Canada and her West India possessions and remained the first colonial power.

CHANGE IN LITERARY STANDARDS: ROMANTICISM

What is Romanticism?—In order to comprehend the dominating spirit of the next age, it is important to understand the meaning of the romantic movement. Between 1740 and 1780 certain romantic influences were at work in opposition to the teaching of the great classical writer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was almost the literary dictator of the age.

The best short definition of romanticism is that of Victor Hugo, who calls it "liberalism in literature." This has the merit of covering all kinds of romantic movements. "Liberalism" here means toleration of departures from fixed standards, such as the classical couplet and didactic and satiric subjects. Romanticism is characterized by less regard for form than for matter, by a return to nature, and by encouragement of deep emotion. Romanticism says: "Be liberal enough not to sneer at authors when they discard narrow rules. Welcome a change and see if variety and feeling will not add more interest to literature."

In this period and the far more glorious one that followed, romanticism made its influence felt for the better in four different ways. An understanding of each of these will make us more intelligent critics.

In the first place, the romantic spirit is opposed to the prosaic. The romantic yearns for the light that never was on sea or land and longs to attain the unfulfilled ambitions of the soul, even when these in full measure are not possible. Sometimes these ambitions are so unrelated to the possible that the romantic has in certain usage become synonymous with the impractical or the absurd; but this is not its meaning in literature. The romantic may not always be "of imagination all compact," but it has a tendency in that direction. To the romanticists a reality of the imagination is as satisfying as a reality of the prosaic reason; hence, unlike the classicists, the romanticists can enjoy The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The imagination is the only power that can grasp the unseen. Any movements that stimulate imaginative activity must give the individual more points of contact with the part of the world that does not obtrude itself on the physical senses, and especially with many facts of existence that cold intellectual activity can never comprehend. Hence, romanticism leads to greater breadth of view.

In the second place, the romantic is the opposite of the hackneyed. Hence, too much repetition may take away a necessary quality from what was once considered romantic. The epithets "ivory" and "raven," when applied to "brow" and to "tresses," respectively, were at first romantic; but much repetition has deprived them of this quality. If an age is to be considered romantic, it must look at things from a point of view somewhat different from that of the age immediately preceding. This change may be either in the character of the thought or in the manner of its presentation, or in both. An example of the formal element of change which appeared, consists in the substitution of blank verse and the Spenserian stanza for the classical couplets of the French school. In the next age, we shall find that the subject matter is no longer chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type.

In the third place, the highest type of romanticism encourages each author to express himself in an individual way, to color the world according to his own moods. This individual element often appears in the ideals that we fashion and in our characteristic conceptions of the spiritual significance of the world and its deepest realities. Two writers of this period by investing nature with a spirit of melancholy illustrate one of the many ways in which romantic thought seeks individuality of expression.

In the fourth place, the romantic movement encouraged the portrayal of broader experiences and especially the expression of deeper feeling. The mid-eighteenth century novels of Richardson and Fielding were strong agencies in this direction; and they were followed in the next age by the even more intense appeal of the great romantic poets to those thoughts and feelings that lie too deep for tears.

The classic school shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of enthusiasm and strong emotion, such as the love of Juliet and the jealousy of Othello; but the romanticists, knowing that the feelings had as much value and power as the intellect, encouraged their expression. Sometimes this tendency was carried to an extreme, both in fiction and in the sentimental drama; but it was necessary for romanticism to call attention to the fact that great literature cannot neglect the world of feeling.

Early Romantic Influences.—The reader and imitators of the great romantic poet, Edmund Spenser, were growing in number. Previous to 1750, there was only one eighteenth-century edition of Spenser's works published in England. In 1758 three editions of the Faerie Queene appeared and charmed readers with the romantic enchantment of bowers, streams, dark forests, and adventures of heroic knights.

James Thomson (1700-1748), a Scotch poet, used the characteristic Spenserian form and subject matter for his romantic poem, The Castle of Indolence (1748). He placed his castle in "Spenser land":—

  "A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was,
    Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
  And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
    Forever flushing round a summer sky."

The influence of Shakespeare increased. In 1741 the great actor David
Garrick captivated London by his presentation of Shakespeare's plays.

Milton's poetry, especially his Il Penseroso, with its individual expression of melancholy, its studious spirit, "commercing with the skies and bringing all Heaven before the eyes," left a strong impress on the romantic spirit of the age. The subject matter of his Paradise Lost satisfied the romantic requirement for strangeness and strong feeling. In the form of his verse, James Thomson shows the influence of Milton as well as of Spencer. Thomson's greatest achievement is The Seasons (1730), a romantic poem, written in Miltonic blank verse. He takes us where—

"The hawthorn whitens; and the juicy groves
Put forth their buds."

He was one of the earliest poets to place Nature in the foreground, to make her the chief actor. He reverses what had been the usual poetic attitude and makes his lovers, shepherds, and harvesters serve largely as a background for the reflection of her moods instead of their own. The spring shower, the gusts sweeping over fields of corn, the sky saddened with the gathering storm of snow, are the very fabric of his verse. Unlike Wordsworth, Thomson had not sufficient genius to invest Nature with an intelligent, loving, companionable soul; but his pictures of her were sufficiently novel and attractive to cause such a classicist and lover of the town as Dr. Samuel Johnson to say:—

  "The reader of The Seasons wonders that he never saw before what
  Thomson shows him, and that he never yet has felt what Thomson
  impresses."

Ossian and "The Castle of Otranto."—Two contemporary works proved a romantic influence out of all proportion to the worth of their subject matter.

Between 1760 and 1764 James Macpherson, a Highland schoolmaster, published a series of poems, which he claimed to have translated from an old manuscript, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third century. This so-called translation in prose may have been forged either in whole or in part; but the weirdness, strange imagery, melancholy, and "other-world talk of ghosts riding on the tempest at nightfall," had a pronounced effect on romantic literature.

[Illustration: HORACE WALPOLE.]

The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Romance (1765) by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) tells a story of a Gothic castle where mysterious labyrinths and trap doors lead to the strangest adventures. The term "Gothic" had been contemptuously applied to whatever was medieval or out of date, whether in architecture, literature, or any form of art. The unusual improbabilities of this Gothic romance were welcomed by readers weary of commonplace works where nothing ever happens. The influence of The Castle of Otranto was even felt across the Atlantic, by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), the early American novelist. Some less pronounced traces of such influence are discernible also in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) was a successor of Walpole in the field of Gothic romance. Her stories, The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho, have their castle and their thrilling, unnatural episodes. Lack of portrayal of character and excess of supernatural incident were causing fiction to suffer severe deterioration.

Percy's Reliques and Translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities.—In 1765 Thomas Percy (1729-1811) published The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an epoch-making work in the history of the romantic movement. The Reliques is a collection of old English ballads and songs, many of which have a romantic story to tell. Scott drew inspiration from them, and Wordsworth acknowledged his indebtedness to their influence. So important was this collection that it has been called "the Bible of the Romantic Reformation."

In 1770 appeared Percy's translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities. For the first time the English world was given an easily accessible volume which disclosed the Norse mythology in all its strength and weirdness. As classical mythology had become hackneyed, poets like Gray rejoiced that there was a new fountain to which they could turn. Thor and his invincible hammer, the Frost Giants, Bifrost or the Rainbow Bridge, Odin, the Valkyries, Valhal, the sad story of Baldur, and the Twilight of the Gods, have appealed strongly to a race which takes pride in its own mythology, to a race which today loves to hear Wagner's translation of these myths into the music of Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.

Thomas Chatterton, 1772-1770.—This Bristol boy was early in his teens impressed with Percy's Reliques and with the fact that Macpherson's claim to having discovered Ossian in old manuscripts had made him famous. Chatterton spent much time in the interesting old church of St.

Mary Redcliffe, of which his ancestors had been sextons for several generations. He studied the manuscripts in an old chest and began to write a series of poems, which he claimed to have discovered among the parchments left by Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk.

Chatterton was unsuccessful in finding a publisher, and he determined to go to London, where he thought that, like other authors, he could live by his pen. In April, 1770, at the age of seventeen, he left Bristol for London, where he took poison in August of the same year to escape a slower death by starvation.

His romantic poetry and pathetic end appealed to all the great poets. Wordsworth spoke of him as "the marvelous boy"; Coleridge called him "young-eyed Poesy"; Shelley honored him in Adonais; and Keats inscribed Endymion to his memory. Traces of his influence may be found in Coleridge and Keats.

The greatest charm of Chatterton's verse appears in unusual epithets and unexpected poetic turns, such, for instance, as may be noted in these lines from his best "Rowley" poem, Aella, a Tragycal Enterlude:—

"Sweet his tongue as the throstle's note;
Quick in dance as thought can be."

  "Hark! the raven flaps his wing
    In the briar'd dell below;
  Hark! the death-owl loud doth sing,
    To the night-mares as they go."

While Chatterton did not leave enough verse of surpassing merit to rank him as a great poet, his work nevertheless entitles him to be chosen from among all his boyish peers to receive the laurel wreath for song.

The Literature of Melancholy.—The choice of subjects in which the emotion of melancholy was given full sway shows one direction taken by the romantic movement. Here, the influence of Milton's Il Penseroso can often be traced. The exquisite Ode to Evening, by William Collins (1721-1759), shows the love for nature's solitudes where this emotion may be nursed. Lines like these:—

    "…be mine the hut,
    That, from the mountain's side,
    Views wilds and swelling floods,
  And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires;
  And hears their simple bell; and marks o'er all
    Thy dewy fingers draw
    The gradual dusky veil,"

caused Swinburne to say: "Corot on canvas might have signed his Ode to Evening."

[Illustration: THOMAS GRAY.]

The high-water mark of the poetry of melancholy of this period was reached in Thomas Gray's (1716-1771) Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). The poet with great art selected those natural phenomena which cast additional gloom upon the scene. We may notice in the very first stanza that the images were chosen with this end in view:—

  "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
    The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
  The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
    And leaves the world to darkness and to me"

Then we listen to the droning flight of the beetle, to the drowsy tinklings from a distant fold, to the moping owl in an ivy-mantled tower. Each natural object, either directly or by contrast, reflects the mind of man. Nature serves as a background for the display of emotion.

Gosse says in his Life of Gray: "The Elegy has exercised an influence on all the poetry of Europe, from Denmark to Italy, from France to Russia. With the exception of certain works of Byron and Shakespeare, no English poem has been so widely admired and imitated abroad."

[Illustration: STOKE POGES CHURCHYARD (SCENE OF GRAY'S ELEGY).]

The Conflict between Romanticism and Classicism.—The influences of this period were not entirely in the direction of romanticism. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of the age, was unsparing in his condemnation of the movement. The weight of his opinion kept many romantic tendencies in check. Even authors like Gray were afraid to adopt the new creed in its entirety. In one stanza of his Hymn to Adversity we find four capitalized abstractions, after the manner of the classical school: Folly, Noise, Laughter, Prosperity; and the following two lay figures, little better than abstractions:—

"The summer Friend, the flattering Foe."

These abstractions have little warmth or human interest. After Gray had studied the Norse mythology, we find him using such strong expressions as "iron-sleet of arrowy shower." Collins's ode on The Passions contains seventeen personified abstractions, from "pale Melancholy" to "brown Exercise."

The conflict between these two schools continues; and many people still think that any poetry which shows polished regularity must be excellent. To prove this statement, we have only to turn to the magazines and glance at the current poetry, which often consists of words rather artificially strung together without the soul of feeling or of thought.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN NOVEL

The Growth of Prose Fiction.—Authentic history does not take us back to the time when human beings were not solaced by tales. The Bible contains stories of marked interest. Beowulf, the medieval romances, the Canterbury Tales, and the ballads relate stories in verse.

For a long time the knight and his adventures held the place of honor in fiction; but the time came when improbable or impossible achievements began to pall. The knight who meets with all kinds of adventures and rescues everybody, is admirably burlesqued in Don Quixote by the Spanish author Cervantes, which appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This world-famous romance shows by its ridicule that the taste for the impossible adventures of chivalry was beginning to pall. The following title to one of the chapters of Don Quixote is sufficiently suggestive: "Chapter LVIII.—Which tells how Adventures came crowding on Don Quixote in Such Numbers that they gave him No Breathing Time."

Much prose fiction was written during the Elizabethan Age. We have seen that Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia contain the germs of romance. Two of the novelists of the sixteenth century, Robert Greene (1560?-1592) and Thomas Lodge (1558?-1625), helped to give to Shakespeare the plots of two of his plays. Greene's novel Pandosto suggested the plot of The Winter's Tale, and Lodge's Rosalind was the immediate source of the plot of As You Like It.

Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two, he was the most prolific of the Elizabethan novelists. His most popular stories deal with the passion of love as well as with adventure. He was also the pioneer of those realistic novelists who go among the slums to study life at first hand. Greene made a careful study of the sharpers and rascals of London and published his observations in a series of realistic pamphlets.

[Illustration: A BLIND BEGGAR ROBBED OF HIS DRINK. From a British
Museum MS.]

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) was the one who introduced into England the picaresque novel in The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jacke Wilton (1594). The picaresque novel (Spanish, picaro, a rogue) is a story of adventure in which rascally tricks play a prominent part. This type of fiction came from Spain and attained great popularity in England. Jacke Wilton is page to a noble house. Many of his sharp tricks were doubtless drawn from real life. Nashe is a worthy predecessor of Defoe in narrating adventures that seem to be founded on actual life.

In spite of an increasing tendency to picture the life of the time, Elizabethan prose fiction did not entirely discard the matter and style of the medieval romances. All types of prose fiction were then too prone to deal with exceptional characters or unusual events. Even realists like Greene did not present typical Elizabethan life. The greatest realist in the prose fiction of the Elizabethan Age was Thomas Deloney (1543?-1600), who chose his materials from the everyday life of common people. He had been a traveling artisan, and he knew how to paint "the life and love of the Elizabethan workshop." He wrote The Gentle Craft, a collection of tales about shoemakers, and Jack of Newberry, a story of a weaver.

The seventeenth century produced The Pilgrim's Progress, a powerful allegorical story of the journey of a soul toward the New Jerusalem. Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689), dramatist and novelist, shows the faults of the Restoration drama in her short tales, which helped to prepare the way for the novelists of the next century. Her best story is Oroonoko (1658), a tale of an African slave, which has been called "the first humanitarian novel in English," and a predecessor of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Fiction in the First Part of the Eighteenth Century.—Defoe's Robinson Crusoe shows a great advance over preceding fiction. In the hands of Defoe, fiction became as natural as fact. Leslie Stephen rightly calls his stories "simple history minus the facts." Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) is artfully planned to make its impossibilities seem like facts. Robinson Crusoe took another forward step in showing how circumstances and environment react on character and develop the power to grapple with difficulties and overcome them. Unlike the majority of modern novels, Defoe's masterpiece does not contain a love story.

The essay of life and manners at the beginning of the eighteenth century presents us at once with various pigments necessary for the palette of the novelist. Students on turning to the second number of The Spectator will find sketches of six different types of character, which are worthy to be framed and hung in a permanent gallery of English fiction. The portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley may even claim one of the places of honor on the walls.

Distinction between the Romance and the Modern Novel.—The romances and tales of adventure which had been so long in vogue differ widely from the modern novel. Many of them pay but little attention to probability; but those which do not offend in this respect generally rely on a succession of stirring incidents to secure attention. Novels showing the analytic skill of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, or the development of character in George Eliot's Silas Marner would have been little read in competition with stirring tales of adventure, if such novels had appeared before a taste for them had been developed by habits of trained observation and thought.

We may broadly differentiate the romance from the modern novel by saying that the romance deals primarily with incident and adventure for their own sake, while the novel concerns itself with these only in so far as they are necessary for a faithful picture of life or for showing the development of character.

Again, the novel gave a much more prominent position to that important class of human beings who do the most of the world's work,—a type that the romance had been inclined to neglect.

[Illustration: SAMUEL RICHARDSON. From an original drawing.]

Samuel Richardson, the First Modern English Novelist.—Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was born in Derbyshire. When he was only thirteen years old some of the young women of the neighborhood unconsciously began to train him for a novelist by employing him to conduct their love correspondence. This training partly accounts for the fact that every one of his novels is merely a collection of letters, written by the chief characters to each other and to their friends, to narrate the progress of events.

At the age of fifteen Richardson went to London and learned the printer's trade, which he followed for the rest of his life. When he was about fifty years old, some publishers asked him to prepare a letter writer which would be useful to country people and to others who could not express themselves with a pen. The idea occurred to him of making these letters tell a connected story. The result was the first modern novel, Pamela, published in four volumes in 1740. This was followed by Clarissa Harlowe, in seven volumes, in 1747-48, and this by Sir Charles Grandison, in seven volumes, in 1753.

The affairs in the lives of the leading characters are so minutely dissected, the plot is evolved so slowly and in a way so unlike the astonishing bounds of the old romance, that one is tempted to say that Richardson's novels progress mere slowly than events in life. One secret of his success depends on the fact that we feel that he is deeply interested in all his characters. He is as much interested in the heroine of his masterpiece, Clarissa Harlowe, as if she were his own daughter. He has the remarkable power of so thoroughly identifying himself with his characters that, after we are introduced to them, we can name them when we hear selections read from their letters.

The length and slow development of his novels repel modern readers, but there was so little genuinely interesting matter in the middle of the eighteenth century that many were sorry his novels were no longer. The novelty of productions of this type also added to their interest. His many faults are largely those of his age. He wearies his readers with his didactic aims. He is narrow and prosy. He poses as a great moralist, but he teaches the morality of direct utility.

The drama and the romance had helped to prepare the way for the novel of everyday domestic life. While this way seemed simple, natural, and inevitable, Richardson was the first to travel in it. Defoe had invested fictitious adventure with reality. Richardson transferred the real human life around him to the pages of fiction. The ascendancy of French influence was noteworthy for a considerable period after the Restoration. England could now repay some of her debt. Richardson exerted powerful influence on the literature of France as well as on that of other continental nations.

[Illustration: HENRY FIELDING. From the original sketch by
Hogarth.]

Henry Fielding, 1707-1754.—The greatest novelist of the eighteenth century, and one of the greatest that England ever produced, was Henry Fielding, who was born in Sharpham Park, Somersetshire. After graduating at the University of Leyden, he became a playwright, a lawyer, a judge of a police court, and, most important of all, a novelist, or a historian of society, as he preferred to style himself.

When Richardson's Pamela appeared, Fielding determined to write a story caricaturing its morality and sentiment, which he considered hypocritical. Before he had gone very far he discovered where his abilities lay, and, abandoning his narrow, satiric aims, he wrote Joseph Andrews (1742), a novel far more interesting than Pamela. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743) tells the story of a rogue who was finally hanged. In 1749 appeared Fielding's masterpiece, Tom Jones, and in 1751 his last novel, Amelia.

Richardson lacks humor, but Fielding is one of the greatest humorists of the eighteenth century. Fielding is also a master of plot. From all literature, Coleridge selected, for perfection of plot, The Alchemist, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Tom Jones.

Fielding's novels often lack refinement, but they palpitate with life. His pages present a wonderful variety of characters, chosen from almost all walks of life. He could draw admirable portraits of women. Thackeray says of Amelia, the heroine of the novel that bears her name:—

"To have invented that character, is not only a triumph of art, but it is a good action. They say it was in his own home that Fielding knew her and loved her, and from his own wife that he drew the most charming character in English fiction… I admire the author of Amelia, and thank the kind master who introduced me to that sweet and delightful companion and friend. Amelia, perhaps, is not a better story than Tom Jones, but it has the better ethics; the prodigal repents at least before forgiveness,—whereas that odious broad-backed Mr. Jones carries off his beauty with scarce an interval of remorse for his manifold errors and shortcomings… I am angry with Jones. Too much of the plum cake and rewards of life fall to that boisterous, swaggering young scapegrace."[1]

The "prodigal" to whom Thackeray refers is Captain Booth, the husband of Amelia, and "Mr. Jones" is the hero of Tom Jones. Fielding's wife, under the name of Sophia Western, is also the heroine of Tom Jones. It is probable that in the characters of Captain Booth and Tom Jones, Fielding drew a partial portrait of himself. He seems, however, to have changed in middle life, for his biographer, Austin Dobson, says of him: "He was a loving father and a kind husband; he exerted his last energies in philanthropy and benevolence; he expended his last ink in defence of Christianity."

Fielding shows the eighteenth-century love of satire. He hates that hypocrisy which tries to conceal itself under a mask of morality. In the evolution of the plots of his novels, he invariably puts such characters in positions that tear away their mask. He displays almost savage pleasure in making them ridiculous. Perhaps the lack of spirituality of the age finds the most ample expression in his pages; but Chaucer's Parish Priest and Fielding's Parson Adams are typical of those persisting moral forces that have bequeathed a heritage of power to England.

[Illustration: LAURENCE STERNE.]

[Illustration: UNCLE TOBY AND CORPORAL TRIM. From a drawing by B.
Westmacott.]

[Illustration: TOBIAS SMOLLETT.]

Sterne and Smollett.—With Richardson and Fielding it is customary to associate two other mid-eighteenth century novelists, Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) and Tobias Smollett (1721-1771). Between 1759 and 1767 Sterne wrote his first novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which presents the delightfully comic and eccentric members of the Shandy family, among whom Uncle Toby is the masterpiece. In 1768 Sterne gave to the world that compound of fiction, essays, and sketches of travel known as A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. The adjective "sentimental" in the title should be specially noted, for it defines Sterne's attitude toward everything in life. He is habitually sentimental in treating not only those things fitted to awaken deep emotion, but also those trivial incidents which ordinarily cause scarcely a ripple of feeling. Although he is sometimes a master of pathos, he frequently gives an exhibition of weak and forced sentimentalism. He more uniformly excels in subtle humor, which is his next most conspicuous characteristic.

Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) are Smollett's best novels. They are composed mainly of a succession of stirring or humorous incidents. In relying for interest more on adventure than on the drawing of character, he reverts to the picaresque type of story.

The Relation of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett to Subsequent Fiction.—Although the modern reader frequently complains that these older novelists often seem heavy, slow in movement, unrefined, and too ready to draw a moral or preach a sermon, yet these four men hold an important place in the history of fiction. With varying degrees of excellence, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne all have the rare power of portraying character from within, of interpreting real life. Some novelists resort to the far easier task of painting merely external characteristics and mannerisms. Smollett belongs to the latter class. His effective focusing of external peculiarities and caricaturing of exceptional individuals has had a far-reaching influence, which may be traced even in the work of so great a novelist as Charles Dickens. Fielding, on the other hand, had great influence of Thackeray, who has recorded in The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century his admiration for his earlier fellow-craftsman.

Although subsequent English fiction has invaded many new fields, although it has entered the domain of history and of sociology, it is not too much to say that later novelists have advanced on the general lines marked out by these four mid-eighteenth century pioneers. We may even affirm with Gosse that "the type of novel invented in England about 1740-50 continued for sixty or seventy years to be the only model for Continental fiction; and criticism has traced in every French novelist, in particular, the stamp of Richardson, if not of Sterne, and of Fielding."

PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND POLITICAL PROSE

Philosophy.—Although the majority of eighteenth-century writers disliked speculative thought and resolutely turned away from it, yet the age produced some remarkable philosophical works, which are still discussed, and which have powerfully affected later thought. David Hume (1711-1776) is the greatest metaphysician of the century. He took for his starting point the conclusions of a contemporary philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753).