English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century Part 3

The difference between the Whig and the Radical was still latent, though to be manifested in the near future. When the 'new Whigs,' as Burke called them, Fox and Sheridan, welcomed the French Revolution in 1789, they saw in it a const.i.tutional movement of the English type and not a thorough-going democratic movement which would level all cla.s.ses, and transfer the political supremacy to a different social stratum.

This implies a dominant characteristic of the English political movement. It was led, to use a later phrase, by Whigs not Radicals; by men who fully accepted the British const.i.tution, and proposed to remove abuses, not to recast the whole system. The Whig wished to carry out more thoroughly the platform accepted in 1688, to replace decaying by sound timbers; but not to reconstruct from the base or to override tradition by abstract and obsolete theories. His desire for change was limited by a strong though implicit conservatism. This characteristic is reflected in the sphere of speculative activity. Philosophy was represented by the Scottish school whose watchword was common sense.

Reid opposed the scepticism of Hume which would lead, as he held, to knocking his head against a post--a course clearly condemned by common sense; but instead of soaring into transcendental and ontological regions, he stuck to 'Baconian induction' and a psychology founded upon experience. Hume himself, as I have said, had written for the speculative few not for the vulgar; and he had now turned from the chase of metaphysical refinements to historical inquiry. Interest in history had become characteristic of the time. The growth of a stable, complex, and continuous social order implies the formation of a corporate memory.

Ma.s.ses of records had already been acc.u.mulated by antiquaries who had constructed rather annals than history, in which the series of events was given without much effort to arrange them in literary form or trace the causal connection. In France, however, Montesquieu had definitely established the importance of applying the historical method to political problems; and Voltaire had published some of his brilliant surveys which attempt to deal with the social characteristics as well as the mere records of battles and conquests. Hume's _History_, admirably written, gave Englishmen the first opportunity of enjoying a lucid survey of the conspicuous facts previously embedded in ponderous antiquarian phrases. Hume was one of the triumvirate who produced the recognised masterpieces of contemporary literature. Robertson's theories are, I take it, superseded: but his books, especially the _Charles V._, not only gave broad surveys but suggested generalisations as to the development of inst.i.tutions, which, like most generalisations, were mainly wrong, but stimulated further inquiry. Gibbon, the third of the triumvirate, uniting the power of presenting great panoramas of history with thorough scholars.h.i.+p and laborious research, produced the great work which has not been, if it ever can be, superseded. A growing interest in history thus led to some of the chief writings of the time, as we can see that it was the natural outgrowth of the intellectual position. The rapid widening of the historical horizon made even a bare survey useful, and led to some recognition of the importance of guiding and correcting political and social theory by careful investigation of past experience. The historian began to feel an ambition to deal in philosophical theories. He was, moreover, touched by the great scientific movement. A complete survey of the intellectual history of the time would of course have to deal with the great men who were laying the foundations of the modern physical sciences; such as Black, and Priestley, and Cavendish, and Hunter. It would indeed, have to point out how small was the total amount of such knowledge in comparison with the vast superstructure which has been erected in the last century. The foundation of the Royal Inst.i.tution at the end of the eighteenth century marks, perhaps, the point at which the importance of physical science began to impress the popular imagination. But great thinkers had long recognised the necessity of applying scientific method in the sphere of social and political investigation. Two men especially ill.u.s.trate the tendency and the particular turn which it took in England. Adam Smith's great book in 1776 applied scientific method to political economy. Smith is distinguished from his French predecessors by the historical element of his work; by his careful study, that is, of economic history, and his consequent presentation of his theory not as a body of absolute and quasi-mathematical truth, but as resting upon the experience and applicable to the concrete facts of his time. His limitation is equally characteristic. He investigated the play of the industrial mechanism with too little reference to the thorough interdependence of economic and other social conditions. Showing how that mechanism adapts itself to supply and demand, he comes to hold that the one thing necessary is to leave free play to compet.i.tion, and that the one essential force is the individual's desire for his own material interests. He became, therefore, the prophet of letting things alone. That doctrine--whatever its merits or defects--implies acquiescence in the existing order, and is radically opposed to a demand for a reconstruction of society. This is most clearly ill.u.s.trated by the other thinker Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham, unlike Smith, shared the contempt for history of the absolute theorists, and was laying down a theory conceived in the spirit of absolutism which became the creed of the uncompromising political radicals of the next generation. But it is characteristic that Bentham was not, during the eighteenth century, a Radical at all. He altogether repudiated and vigorously denounced the 'Rights of Men' doctrines of Rousseau and his followers, and regarded the Declaration of Independence in which they were embodied as a mere hotchpotch of absurdity. He is determined to be thoroughly empirical--to take men as he found them. But his utilitarianism supposed that men's views of happiness and utility were uniform and clear, and that all that was wanted was to show them the means by which their ends could be reached.

Then, he thought, rulers and subjects would be equally ready to apply his principles. He fully accepted Adam Smith's theory of non-interference in economical matters; and his view of philosophy in the lump was that there was no such thing, only a heap of obsolete fallacies and superst.i.tions which would be easily dispersed by the application of a little downright common sense. Bentham's utilitarianism, again, is congenial to the whole intellectual movement.

His ethical theory was substantially identical with that of Paley--the most conspicuous writer upon theology of the generation,--and Paley is as thoroughly empirical in his theology as in his ethics, and makes the truth of religion essentially a question of historical and scientific evidence.

It follows that neither in practice nor in speculative questions were the English thinkers of the time prescient of any coming revolution.

They denounced abuses, but they had regarded abuses as removable excrescences on a satisfactory system. They were content to appeal to common sense, and to leave philosophers to wrangle over ultimate results. They might be, and in fact were, stirring questions which would lead to far more vital disputes; but for the present they were unconscious of the future, and content to keep the old machinery going though desiring to improve its efficiency. The characteristic might be elucidated by comparison with the other great European literatures. In France, Voltaire had begun about 1762 his crusade against orthodoxy, or, as he calls it, his attempt to crush the infamous. He was supported by his allies, the Encyclopaedists. While Helvetius and Holbach were expounding materialism and atheism, Rousseau had enunciated the political doctrines which were to be applied to the Revolution, and elsewhere had uttered that sentimental deism which was to be so dear to many of his readers. Our neighbours, in short, after their characteristic fas.h.i.+on, were pus.h.i.+ng logic to its consequences, and fully awake to the approach of an impending catastrophe. In Germany the movement took the philosophical and literary shape. Lessing's critical writings had heralded the change. Goethe, after giving utterance to pa.s.sing phases of thought, was rising to become the embodiment of a new ideal of intellectual culture. Schiller pa.s.sed through the storm and stress period and developed into the greatest national dramatist. Kant had awakened from his dogmatic theory, and the publication of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in 1781 had awakened the philosophical world of Germany. In both countries the study of earlier English literature, of the English deists and freethinkers, of Shakespeare and of Richardson, had had great influence, and had been the occasion of new developments. But it seemed as though England had ceased to be the originator of ideas, and was for the immediate future at least to receive political and philosophical impulses from France and Germany. To explain the course taken in the different societies, to ask how far it might be due to difference of characteristics, and of political const.i.tutions, of social organism and individual genius, would be a very pretty but rather large problem. I refer to it simply to ill.u.s.trate the facts, to emphasise the quiet, orderly, if you will, sleepy movement of English thought which, though combined with great practical energy and vigorous investigation of the neighbouring departments of inquiry, admitted of comparative indifference to the deeper issues involved. It did not generate that stimulus to literary activity due to the dawning of new ideas and the opening of wide vistas of speculation. When the French Revolution broke out, it took Englishmen, one may say, by surprise, and except by a few keen observers or rare disciples of Rousseau, was as unexpected as the earthquake of Lisbon.

Let us glance, now, at the cla.s.s which was to carry on the literary tradition. It is known to us best through Boswell, and its characteristics are represented by Johnson's favourite club. In one of his talks with Boswell the great man amused himself by showing how the club might form itself into a university. Every branch of knowledge and thought might, he thought, be represented, though it must be admitted that some of the professors suggested were scarcely up to the mark. The social variety is equally remarkable. Among the thirty or forty members elected before Johnson's death, there were the lights of literature; Johnson himself and Goldsmith, Adam Smith and Gibbon, and others of less fame. The aristocratic element was represented by Beauclerk and by half a dozen peers, such as the amiable Lord Charlemont; Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Wyndham represent political as well as literary eminence; three or four bishops represent Church authority; legal luminaries included Dunning, William Scott (the famous Lord Stowell), Sir Robert Chambers, and the amazingly versatile Sir William Jones. Boswell and Langton are also cultivated country gentlemen; Sir Joseph Banks stood for science, and three other names show the growing respect for art. The amiable Dr. Burney was a musician who had raised the standard of his calling; Garrick had still more conspicuously gained social respect for the profession of actor; and Sir Joshua Reynolds was the representative of the English school of painters, whose works still impress upon us the beauty of our great-grandmothers and the charm of their children, and suggest the existence of a really dignified and pure domestic life in a cla.s.s too often remembered by the reckless gambling and loose morality of the gilded youth of the day. To complete the picture of the world in which Johnson was at home we should have to add from the outer sphere such types as Thrale, the prosperous brewer, and the lively Mrs. Thrale and Mrs. Montague, who kept a salon and was president of the 'Blues.'

The feminine society which was beginning to write our novels was represented by Miss Burney and Hannah More; and the thriving booksellers who were beginning to become publishers, such as Strahan and the Dillys, at whose house he had the famous meeting with the reprobate Wilkes. To many of us, I suppose, an intimacy with that Johnsonian group has been a first introduction to an interest in English literature. Thanks to Boswell, we can hear its talk more distinctly than that of any later circle. When we compare it to the society of an earlier time, one or two points are conspicuous. Johnson's club was to some extent a continuation of the clubs of Queen Anne's time. But the Wits of the earlier period who met at taverns to drink with the patrons were a much smaller and more dependent body. What had since happened had been the growth of a great comfortable middle-cla.s.s--meaning by middle-cla.s.s the upper stratum, the professional men, the lawyers, clergymen, physicians, the merchants who had been enriched by the growth of commerce and manufactures; the country gentlemen whose rents had risen, and who could come to London and rub off their old rusticity. The aristocracy is still in possession of great wealth and political power, but beneath it has grown up an independent society which is already beginning to be the most important social stratum and the chief factor in political and social development. It has sufficient literary cultivation to admit the distinguished authors and artists who are becoming independent enough to take their place in its ranks and appear at its tables and rule the conversation. The society is still small enough to have in the club a single representative body and one man for dictator. Johnson succeeded in this capacity to Pope, Dryden, and his namesake Ben, but he was the last of the race. Men like Carlyle and Macaulay, who had a similar distinction in later days, could only be leaders of a single group or section in the more complex society of their time, though it was not yet so mult.i.tudinous and chaotic as the literary cla.s.s has become in our own. Talk could still be good, because the comparatively small society was constantly meeting, and each prepared to take his part in the game, and was not being swept away distractedly into a miscellaneous vortex of all sorts and conditions of humanity. Another fact is conspicuous.

The environment, we may say, of the man of letters was congenial. He shared and uttered the opinions of the cla.s.s to which he belonged.

Buckle gives a striking account of the persecution to which the French men of letters were exposed at this period; Voltaire, Buffon, and Rousseau, Diderot, Marmontel, and Morellet, besides a whole series of inferior authors, had their books suppressed and were themselves either exiled or imprisoned. There was a state of war in which almost the whole literary cla.s.s attacked the established creed while the rulers replied by force instead of argument. In England men of letters were allowed, with a few exceptions, to say what they thought, and simply shared the average beliefs of their cla.s.s and their rulers. If some leant towards freethinking, the general tendency of the Johnson circle was harshly opposed to any revolutionary movement, and authors were satisfied with the creeds as with the inst.i.tutions amid which they lived.

The English literary cla.s.s was thus content to utter the beliefs prevalent in the social stratum to which the chief writers belonged--a stratum which had no special grievances and no revolutionary impulses, and which could make its voice sufficiently heard though by methods which led to no explicit change in the const.i.tution, and suggests only a change in the forces which really lay behind them. The chief political changes mean for the present that 'public opinion' was acquiring more power; that the newspaper press as its organ was especially growing in strength; that Parliament was thrown open to the reporter, and speeches addressed to the const.i.tuencies as well as to the Houses of Parliament, and therefore the authority of the legislation becoming more amenable to the opinions of the const.i.tuency. That is to say, again, that the journalist and orator were growing in power and a corresponding direction given to literary talent. The Wilkes agitation led to the _Letters of Junius_--one of the most conspicuous models of the style of the period; and some of the newspapers which were to live through the next century began to appear in the following years. This period again might almost be called the culminating period of English rhetoric. The speeches of Pitt and Burke and Fox and Sheridan in the House of Commons and at the impeachment of Warren Hastings must be regarded from the literary as well as the political point of view, though in most cases the decay of the temporary interests involved has been fatal to their permanence. The speeches are still real speeches, intended to affect the audience addressed, and yet partly intended also for the reporters. When the audience becomes merely the pretext, and the real aim is to address the public, the speech tends to become a pamphlet in disguise and loses its rhetorical character. I may remark in pa.s.sing that almost the only legal speeches which, so far as my knowledge goes, are still readable, were those of Erskine, who, after trying the careers of a sailor and a soldier, found the true application for his powers in oratory. Though his legal knowledge is said to have been slight, the conditions of the time enabled him in addressing a British jury to put forward a political manifesto and to display singular literary skill. Burke, however, is the typical figure. Had he been a German he might have been a Lessing, and the author of the _Sublime and Beautiful_ might, like the author of _Laokoon_, have stimulated his countrymen by literary criticism. Or he might have obtained a professors.h.i.+p or a court preachers.h.i.+p and, like Herder, have elaborated ideas towards the future of a philosophy of history. In England he was drawn into the political vortex, and in that capacity delivered speeches which also appeared as pamphlets, and which must rank among the great masterpieces of English literature. I need not inquire whether he lost more by giving to party what was meant for mankind, or whether his philosophy did not gain more by the necessity of constant application to the actual facts of the time. That necessity no doubt limited both the amount and the systematic completeness of his writings, though it also emphasised some of their highest merits. The English political order tended in any case to divert a great deal of literary ability into purely political channels--a peculiarity which it has not yet lost. Burke is the typical instance of this combination, and ill.u.s.trates most forcibly the point to which I have already adverted.

Johnson, as we know, was a ma.s.s of obstinate Tory prejudice, and held that the devil was the first Whig. He held at bottom, I think, that politics touched only the surface of human life; that 'kings or laws,'

as he put it, can cause or cure only a small part of the evils which we suffer, and that some authority is absolutely necessary, and that it matters little whether it be the authority of a French monarch or an English parliament. The Whig he thought objected to authority on principle, and was therefore simply subversive. Something of the same opinion was held by Johnson's circle in general. They were conservative both in politics and theology, and English politics and theological disputes did not obviously raise the deeper issues. Even the devil-descended Whig--especially the variety represented by Burke--was as far as possible from representing what he took for the diabolic agency. Burke represents above all things the political application of the historical spirit of the period. His hatred for metaphysics, for discussions of abstract rights instead of practical expediency; his exaltation of 'prescription' and 'tradition'; his admiration for Montesquieu and his abhorrence of Rousseau; his idolatry of the British const.i.tution, and in short his whole political doctrine from first to last, implies the profound conviction of the truth of the principles embodied in a thorough historical method. n.o.body, I think, was ever more consistent in his first principles, though his horror of the Revolution no doubt led him so to exaggerate one side of his teaching that he was led to denounce some of the consequences which naturally followed from other aspects of his doctrine. The schism between the old and the new Whigs was not to be foreseen during this period, nor the coming into the foreground of the deeper problems involved.

I may now come to the purely literary movement. I have tried to show that neither in philosophy, theology, nor political and social strata, was there any belief in the necessity of radical changes, or prescience of a coming alteration of the intellectual atmosphere. Speculation, like politics, could advance quietly along the old paths without fearing that they might lead to a precipice; and society, in spite of very vigorous and active controversy upon the questions which decided it was in the main self-satisfied, complacent, and comfortable. Adherence to the old system is after all the general rule, and it is of the change not the persistence that we require some account. At the beginning of our period, Pope's authority was still generally admitted, although many symptoms of discontent had appeared, and Warton was proposing to lower him from the first to the second rank. The two most brilliant writers who achieved fame in the early years of George III., Goldsmith and Sterne, mark a characteristic moment in the literary development.

Goldsmith's poems the _Traveller_ (1765) and the _Deserted Village_ (1770), and the _Vicar of Wakefield_ (1766), are still on the old lines.

The poetry adopts Pope's versification, and implies the same ideal; the desire for lucidity, sympathy, moderation, and the qualities which would generally be connoted by cla.s.sical. The substance, distinguished from the style, shows the sympathy with sentimentalism of which Rousseau was to be the great exponent. Goldsmith is beginning to denounce luxury--a characteristic mark of the sentimentalist--and his regret for the period when 'every rood of earth maintained its man' is one side of the aspiration for a return to the state of nature and simplicity of manners. The inimitable Vicar recalls Sir Roger de Coverley and the gentle and delicate touch of Addison. But the Vicar is beginning to take an interest in philanthropy. He is impressed by the evils of the old prison system which had already roused Oglethorpe (who like Goldsmith--as I may notice--disputed with Johnson as to the evils of luxury) and was soon to arouse Howard. The greatest attraction of the Vicar is due to the personal charm of Goldsmith's character, but his character makes him sympathise with the wider social movements and the growth of genuine philanthropic sentiment. Goldsmith, in his remarks upon the _Present State of Polite Learning_ (1759), explains the decay of literature (literature is always decaying) by the general enervation which accompanies learning and the want of originality caused by the growth of criticism. That was not an unnatural view at a time when the old forms are beginning to be inadequate for the new thoughts which are seeking for utterance. As yet, however, Goldsmith's own work proves sufficiently that the new motive could be so far adapted to the old form as to produce an artistic masterpiece. Sterne may ill.u.s.trate a similar remark. He represents, no doubt, a kind of sham sentimentalism with an insincerity which has disgusted many able critics. He was resolved to attract notice at any price--by putting on cap and bells, and by the pruriency which stains his best work. Like many contemporaries he was reading old authors and turned them to account in a way which exposed him to the charge of plagiarism. He valued them for their quaintness.

They enabled him to satisfy his propensity for being deliberately eccentric which made Horace Walpole call _Tristram Shandy_ the 'dregs of nonsense,' and the learned Dr. Farmer prophesied that in twenty years it would be necessary to search antiquarian shops for a copy. Sterne's great achievement, however, was not in the mere buffoonery but in the pa.s.sages where he continued the Addison tradition. Uncle Toby is a successor of Sir Roger, and the famous death of Lefevre is told with inimitable simplicity and delicacy of touch. Goldsmith and Sterne work upon the old lines, but make use of the new motives and materials which are beginning to interest readers, and which will in time call for different methods of treatment.

I must briefly indicate one other point. The society of which Garrick was a member, and which was both reading Shakespeare and seeing his plays revived, might well seem fitted to maintain a drama. Goldsmith complains of the decay of the stage, which he attributes partly to the exclusion of new pieces by the old Shakespearian drama. On that point he agrees as far as he dares with Voltaire. He ridiculed Home's _Douglas_, one of the last tragedies which made even a temporary success, and which certainly showed that the true impulse was extinct. But Goldsmith and his younger contemporary Sheridan succeeded for a time in restoring vigour to comedy. Their triumph over the sentimentalists Kelly and c.u.mberland showed, as Johnson put it, that they could fill the aim of the comedian, namely, making an audience merry. _She Stoops to Conquer_ and _The School for Scandal_ remain among genuine literary masterpieces.

They are revivals of the old Congreve method, and imply the growth of a society more decent and free from the hard cynical brutality which disgraced the earlier writers. I certainly cannot give a sufficient reason why the society of Johnson and Reynolds, full of shrewd common sense, enjoying humour, and with a literary social tradition, should not have found other writers capable of holding up the comic mirror. I am upon the verge of a discussion which seems to be endless, the causes of the decay of the British stage. I must give it a wide berth, and only note that, as a fact, Sheridan took to politics, and his mantle fell on no worthy successor. The next craze (for which he was partly responsible) was the German theatre of Kotzebue, which represented the intrusion of new influences and the production of a great quant.i.ty of rubbish. After Goldsmith the poetic impulse seems to have decayed entirely. After the _Deserted Village_ (1770) no striking work appeared till Crabbe published his first volume (1781), and was followed by his senior Cowper in 1782. Both of them employed the metre of Pope, though Cowper took to blank verse; and Crabbe, though he had read and admired Spenser, was to the end of his career a thorough disciple of Pope.

Johnson read and revised his _Village_, which was thoroughly in harmony with the old gentleman's poetic creed. Yet both Cowper and Crabbe stimulate what may be called in some sense 'a return to nature'; though not in such a way as to announce a literary revolution. Each was restrained by personal conditions. Cowper's poetical aims were profoundly affected by his religious views. The movement which we call Methodist was essentially moral and philanthropic. It agreed so far with Rousseau's sentimentalism that it denounced the corruptions of the existing order; but instead of attributing the evils to the departure from the ideal state of nature, expressed them by the theological doctrine of the corruption of the human heart. That implied in some senses a fundamental difference. But there was a close coincidence in the judgment of actual motives. Cowper fully agreed with Rousseau that our rulers had become selfish and luxurious; that war was kept up to satisfy the ambition of kings and courtiers; that vice flourished because the aims of our rulers and teachers were low and selfish, and that slavery was a monstrous evil supported by the greed of traders.

Brown's _Estimate_, he said, was thoroughly right as to our degeneracy, though Brown had not perceived the deepest root of the evil. Cowper's satire has lost its salt because he had retired too completely from the world to make a telling portrait. But he succeeds most admirably when he finds relief from the tortures of insanity by giving play to the exquisite playfulness and tenderness which was never destroyed by his melancholy. He delights us by an unconscious ill.u.s.tration of the simple domestic life in the quiet Olney fields, which we see in another form in the charming White of Selborne. He escapes from the ghastly images of religious insanity when he has indulged in the innocent play of tender and affectionate emotions, which finds itself revealed in tranquillising scenery. The literary result is a fresh appreciation of 'Nature.' Pope's Nature has become for him artificial and conventional. From a religious point of view it represents 'cold morality,' and the subst.i.tution of logical argumentation for the language of the heart. It suggests the cynicism of the heartless fine gentleman who sneers at Wesley and Bunyan, and covers his want of feeling by a stilted deism. Cowper tried unsuccessfully to supersede Pope's _Homer_; in trying to be simple he became bald; but he also tried most successfully to express with absolute sincerity the simple and deep emotions of an exquisitely tender character.

Crabbe meanwhile believed in Pope, and had a st.u.r.dy solid contempt for Methodism. Cowper's guide, Newton, would have pa.s.sed with him for a nuisance and a fanatic. Crabbe is a thorough realist. In some ways he may be compared to his contemporary Malthus. Malthus started, as we know, by refuting the sentimentalism of Rousseau; Crabbe's _Village_ is a protest against the embodiment of the same spirit in Goldsmith. He is determined to see things as they are, with no rose-coloured mist. Crabbe replies to critics that if his realism was unpoetical, the criterion suggested would condemn much of Dryden and Pope as equally unpoetical.

He was not renouncing but carrying on the tradition, and was admired by Byron in his rather wayward mood of Pope-wors.h.i.+p as the last representative of the legitimate school. The position is significant.

Crabbe condemns Goldsmith's 'Nature' because it is 'unnatural.' It means the Utopian ideal of Rousseau which never did and never can exist. It belongs to the world of old-fas.h.i.+oned pastoral poetry, in which Corydon and Thyrsis had their being. He will paint British squires and farmers and labourers as he has seen them with his own eyes. The wit has become for him the mere fop, whose poetry is an arbitrary convention, a mere plaything for the fine ladies and gentlemen detached from the living interests of mankind. The Pope tradition is still maintained, but is to be revised by being brought down again to contact with solid earth.

Therefore on the one hand he is thoroughly in harmony with Johnson, the embodiment of common sense, and on the other, excited the enthusiasm of Wordsworth and Scott, who, though leaders of a new movement, heartily sympathised with his realism and rejection of the old conventionalism.

Though Crabbe regards Cowper's religion as fanaticism, they are so far agreed that both consider that poetry has become divorced from reality and reflects the ugly side of actual human nature. They do not propose a revolution in its methods, but to put fresh life into it by seeing things as they are. And both of them, living in the country, apply the principle to 'Nature' in the sense of scenery. Cowper gives interest to the flat meadows of the Ouse; and Crabbe, a botanist and lover of natural history, paints with unrivalled fidelity and force the flat sh.o.r.es and tideways of his native East Anglia. They are both therefore prophets of a love of Nature, in one of the senses of the Protean word.

Cowper, who prophesied the fall of the Bastille and denounced luxury, was to some extent an unconscious ally of Rousseau, though he regarded the religious aspects of Rousseau's doctrine as shallow and unsatisfactory. Crabbe shows the att.i.tude of which Johnson is the most characteristic example. Johnson was thoroughly content with the old school in so far as it meant that poetry must be thoroughly rational and sensible. His hatred of cant and foppery was so far congenial to the tradition; but it implied a difference. To him Pope's metaphysical system was mere foppery, and the denunciation of luxury mere cant. He felt mere contempt for Goldsmith's flirtation with that vein of sentiment. His dogged conservatism prevented him from recognising the strength of the philosophical movements which were beginning to clothe themselves in Rousseauism. Burke, if he condemned the revolutionary doctrine as wicked, saw distinctly how potent a lesson it was becoming.

Johnson, showing the true British indifference, could treat the movement with contempt--Hume's scepticism was a mere 'milking the bull'--a love of paradox for its own sake--and Wilkes and the Whigs, though wicked in intention, were simple and superficial dealers in big words. In the literary application the same st.u.r.dy common sense was opposed to the Pope tradition so far as that tradition opposed common sense.

Conventional diction, pastorals, and twaddle about Nature belonged to the nonsensical side. He entirely sympathised with Crabbe's subst.i.tution of the real living brutish clown for the unreal swain of Arcadia; that is, for developing poetry by making it thoroughly realistic even at the cost of being prosaic.

So far the tendency to realism was thoroughly congenial to the matter-of-fact utilitarian spirit of the time, and was in some sense in harmony with a 'return to Nature.' But it was unconsciously becoming divorced from some of the great movements of thought, of which it failed to perceive the significance. A new inspiration was showing itself, to which critics have done at least ample justice. The growth of history had led to renewed interest in much that had been despised as mere curiosities or ridiculed as implying the barbarism of our ancestors. I have already noticed the dilettantism of the previous generation, and the interest of Gray and Collins and Warton and Walpole in antiquarian researches. Gothic had ceased to be a simple term of reproach. The old English literature is beginning to be studied seriously. Pope and Warburton and Johnson had all edited Shakespeare; Garrick had given him fresh popularity, and the first edition of _Old Plays_ by Dodsley appeared in 1744. Similar studies were extending in many directions.

Mallet in his work upon Denmark (1755) gave a translation of the _Eddas_ which called attention to Scandinavian mythology. Bodmer soon afterwards published for the first time the _Nibelungen Lied_.

Macpherson startled the literary world in 1762 by what professed to be an epic poem from the Gaelic. Chatterton's career (1752-1770) was a proof not only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's _Reliques_ appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough by publis.h.i.+ng a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation of Icelandic poetry (1763). Not long afterwards Sir William Jones published translations of Oriental poetry. Briefly, as historical, philological, and antiquarian research extended, the man of letters was also beginning to seek for new 'motives,' and to discover merits in old forms of literature. The importance of this new impulse cannot be over-estimated, but it may be partly misinterpreted. It is generally described as a foretaste of what is called the Romantic movement. The word is no doubt very useful--though exceedingly vague. The historian of literature is sometimes given to speak as though it meant the revelation of a new and definite creed. He speaks, that is, like the historian of science, who accepts Darwinism as the revelation of a new principle transfusing the old conceptions, and traces the various antic.i.p.ations, the seminal idea; or like the Protestant theologian who used to regard Luther as having announced the full truth dimly foreseen by Wicliff or the Albigenses.

Romanticism, that is, is treated as a single movement; while the men who share traces of the taste are supposed to have not only foreseen the new doctrine but to have been the actual originators. Yet I think that all competent writers will also agree that Romanticism is a name which has been applied to a number of divergent or inconsistent schools. It seems to mean every impulse which tended to find the old clothing inadequate for the new thoughts, which caused dissatisfaction with the old philosophical and religious or political systems and aspirations, and took a corresponding variety of literary forms. It is far too complex a phenomenon to be summed up in any particular formula. The mischief is that to take the literary evolution as an isolated phenomenon is to miss an essential clue to such continuity and unity as it really possesses.

When we omit the social factor, the solidarity which exists between contemporaries occupied with the same problem and sharing certain common beliefs, each school appears as an independent unit, implying a discontinuity or a simple relation of contrariety, and we explain the succession by such a verbal phrase as 'reaction.' The real problem is, what does the reaction mean? and that requires us to take into account the complex and variously composed currents of thought and reason which are seeking for literary expression. The popularity of _Ossian_ for example, is a curious phenomenon. At the first sight we are disposed to agree with Johnson that any man could write such stuff if he would abandon his mind to it, and to add that if any one would write it no one could read it. Yet we know that _Ossian_ appealed to the gigantic intellects of Goethe and Napoleon. That is a symptom of deep significance; _Ossian_ suited Goethe in the _Werther_ period and Napoleon took it with him when he was dreaming of rivalling Alexander's conquests in the East. We may perhaps understand why the gigantesque pictures in _Ossian_ of the northern mountains and scenery--with all its vagueness, incoherence, and bombast, was somehow congenial to minds dissatisfied, for different reasons, with the old ideals. To explain the charm more precisely is a very pretty problem for the acute critic.

_Ossian_, it is clear, fell in with the mood characteristic of the time. But when we ask what effect it produced in English literature, the answer must surely be, 'next to none.' Gray was enthusiastic and tried to believe in its authenticity. Scots, like Blair and even the sceptical Hume--though Hume soon revolted--defended _Ossian_ out of patriotic prejudice, and Burns professed to admire. But n.o.body in Great Britain took to writing Ossianesque. Wordsworth was simply disgusted by the unreality, and nothing could be less in the _Ossian_ vein than Burns.

The _Ossian_ craze ill.u.s.trates the extension of historical interest, of which I have spoken, and the vague discontent of Wertherism. But I do not see how the publication can be taken as the cause of a new departure, although it was an indication of the state of mind which led to a new departure. Percy's _Reliques_, again, is often mentioned as an 'epoch-making' book. Undoubtedly it was a favourite with Scott and many other readers of his generation. But how far did it create any change of taste? The old ballad was on one side congenial to the cla.s.sical school, as Addison showed by his criticism of _Chevy Chase_ for its simple version of a heroic theme. Goldsmith tried his hand at a ballad about the same time with Percy, and both showed that they were a little too much afraid that simplicity might degenerate into childishness, and gain Johnson's contempt. But there was nothing in the old school incompatible with a rather patronising appreciation of the popular poetry. It gained fresh interest when the historical tendency gave a newer meaning to the old society in which ballad poetry had flourished.

This suggests the last remark which I have room to make. One characteristic of the period is a growth of provincial centres of some intellectual culture. As manufactures extended, and manufacturers began to read, circles of some literary pretensions sprang up in Norwich, Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester; and most conspicuously in Edinburgh. Though the Scot was coming south in numbers which alarmed Johnson, there were so many eminent Scots at home during this time that Edinburgh seems at least to have rivalled London as an intellectual centre. The list of great men includes Hume and Adam Smith, Robertson and Hailes and Adam Ferguson, Kames, Monboddo, and Dugald Stewart among philosophers and historians; John Home, Blair, G. Campbell, Beattie, and Henry Mackenzie among men of letters; Hutton, Black, Cullen, and Gregory among scientific leaders. Scottish patriotism then, as at other periods, was vigorous, and happily ceasing to be antagonistic to unionist sentiment. The Scot admitted that he was touched by provincialism; but he retained a national pride, and only made the modest and most justifiable claim that he was intrinsically superior to the Southron. He still preserved intellectual and social traditions, and cherished them the more warmly, which marked him as a distinct member of the United Kingdom. In Scotland the rapid industrial development had given fresh life to the whole society without obliterating its distinctive peculiarities. Song and ballad and local legends were still alive, and not merely objects of literary curiosity. It was under such conditions that Burns appeared, the greatest beyond compare of all the self-taught poets. Now there can be no explanation whatever of the occurrence of a man of genius at a given time and place. For anything we can say, Burns was an accident; but given the genius, his relation was clear, and the genius enabled him to recognise it with unequalled clearness. Burns became, as he has continued, the embodiment of the Scottish genius. Scottish patriotic feeling animates some of his n.o.blest poems, and whether as an original writer--and no one could be more original--or as adapting and revising the existing poetry, he represents the essential spirit of the Scottish peasant. I need not point out that this implies certain limitations, and some failings worse than limitation. But it implies also the spontaneous and masculine vigour which we may call poetic inspiration of the highest kind. He had of course read the English authors such as Addison and Pope. So far as he tried to imitate the accepted form he was apt to lose his fire. He is inspired when he has a nation behind him and is the mouthpiece of sentiments, traditional, but also living and vigorous. He represents, therefore, a new period. The lyrical poetry seemed to have died out in England. It suddenly comes to life in Scotland and reaches unsurpa.s.sable excellence within certain limits, because a man of true genius rises to utter the emotions of a people in their most natural form without bothering about canons of literary criticism. The society and the individual are in thorough harmony, and that, I take it, is the condition of really great literature at all times.

This must suggest my concluding moral. The watchword of every literary school may be brought under the formula 'Return to Nature': though 'Nature' receives different interpretations. To be natural, on the one hand, is to be sincere and spontaneous; to utter the emotions natural to you in the forms which are also natural, so far as the accepted canons are not rules imposed by authority but have been so thoroughly a.s.similated as to express your own instinctive impulses. On the other side, it means that the literature must be produced by the cla.s.s which embodies the really vital and powerful currents of thought which are moulding society. The great author must have a people behind him; utter both what he really thinks and feels and what is thought and felt most profoundly by his contemporaries. As the literature ceases to be truly representative, and adheres to the conventionalism of the former period, it becomes 'unnatural' and the literary forms become a survival instead of a genuine creation. The history of eighteenth century literature ill.u.s.trates this by showing how as the social changes give new influence to the middle cla.s.ses and then to the democracy, the aristocratic cla.s.s which represented the culture of the opening stage is gradually pushed aside; its methods become antiquated and its conventions cease to represent the ideals of the most vigorous part of the population. The return to Nature with Pope and Addison and Swift meant, get rid of pedantry, be thoroughly rational, and take for your guide the bright common sense of the Wit and the scholar. During Pope's supremacy the Wit who represents the aristocracy produces some admirably polished work; but the development of journalism and Grub Street shows that he is writing to satisfy the popular interests so keenly watched by Defoe in Grub Street. In the period of Richardson and Fielding Nature has become the Nature of the middle-cla.s.s John Bull. The old romances have become hopelessly unnatural, and they will give us portraits of living human beings, whether Clarissa or Tom Jones. The rationalism of the higher cla.s.s strikes them as cynical, and the generation which listens to Wesley must have also a secular literature, which, whether sentimental as with Richardson or representing common sense with Fielding, must at any rate correspond to solid substantial matter-of-fact motives, intelligible to the ordinary Briton of the time. In the last period, the old literary conventions, though retaining their old literary prestige, are becoming threadbare while preserving the old forms. Even the Johnsonian conservatism implies hatred for cant, for mere foppery and sham sentimentalism; and though it uses them, insists with Crabbe upon keeping in contact with fact. We must be 'realistic,' though we can retain the old literary forms. The appeal to Nature, meanwhile, has come with Rousseau and the revolutionists to mean something different--the demand, briefly, for a thorough-going reconstruction of the whole philosophical and social fabric. To the good old Briton, Whig or Tory, that seemed to be either diabolical or mere Utopian folly. To him the British const.i.tution is still thoroughly congenial and 'natural.'

Meanwhile intellectual movement has introduced a new element. The historical sense is being developed, as a settled society with a complex organisation becomes conscious at once of its continuity and of the slow processes of growth by which it has been elaborated. The fusion of English and Scottish nations stimulates the patriotism of the smaller though better race, and generates a pa.s.sionate enthusiasm for the old literature which represents the characteristic genius of the smaller community. Burns embodies the sentiment, though without any conscious reference to theories philosophical or historical. The significance was to be ill.u.s.trated by Scott--an equally fervid patriot. He tells Crabbe how oddly a pa.s.sage in the _Village_ was a.s.sociated in his memory with border-riding ballads and sc.r.a.ps of old plays. 'Nature' for Scott meant 'his honest grey hills' speaking in every fold of old traditional lore.

That meant, in one sense, that Scott was not only romantic but reactionary. That was his weakness. But if he was the first to make the past alive, he was also the first to make the present historical. His masterpieces are not his descriptions of mediaeval knights so much as the stories in which he illuminates the present by his vivid presentation of the present order as the outgrowth from the old, and makes the Scottish peasant or lawyer or laird interesting as a product and a type of social conditions. Nature therefore to him includes the natural processes by which society has been developed under the stress of circ.u.mstances.

Nothing could be more unnatural for him than the revolutionary principle which despises tradition and regards the patriotic sentiment as superfluous and irrational. Wordsworth represents again another sense of Nature. He announced as his special principle that poetry should speak the language of Nature, and therefore, as he inferred, of the ordinary peasant and uneducated man. The hills did not speak to him of legend or history but of the sentiment of the unsophisticated yeoman or 'statesman.' He sympathised enthusiastically with the French Revolution so long as he took it to utter the simple republican sentiment congenial to a small society of farmers and shepherds. He abandoned it when he came to think that it really meant the dissolution of the religious and social sentiments which correspond to the deepest instincts which bound such men together. Coleridge represents a variation. He was the first Englishman to be affected by the philosophical movement of Germany. He had been an ardent revolutionist in the days when he adopted the metaphysics of Hartley and Priestley, which fell in with the main eighteenth-century current of scepticism. He came to think that the movement represented a perversion of the intellect. It meant materialism and scepticism, or interpreted Nature as a mere dead mechanism. It omitted, therefore, the essential element which is expressed by what we may roughly call the mystical tendency in philosophy. Nature must be taken as the embodiment of a divine idea. Nature, therefore, in his poetry, is regarded not from Scott's point of view as subordinate to human history, or from Wordsworth's as teaching the wisdom of unsophisticated mankind, but rather as a symbolism legible to the higher imagination. Though his fine critical sense made him keep his philosophy and his poetry distinct, that is the common tendency which gives unity to his work and which made his utterances so stimulating to congenial intellects. His criticism of the 'Nature' of Pope and Bolingbroke would be substantially, that in their hands the reason which professed to interpret Nature became cold and materialistic, because its logic left out of account the mysterious but essential touches revealed only to the heart, or, in his language, to the reason but not to the understanding.

Meanwhile, though the French revolutionary doctrines were preached in England, they only attracted the literary leaders for a time, and it was not till the days of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley that they found thorough-going representatives in English poetry. On that, however, I must not speak.

I have tried to indicate briefly how Scott and Wordsworth and Coleridge, the most eminent leaders of the new school, partly represented movements already obscurely working in England, and how they were affected by the new ideas which had sprung to life elsewhere. They, like their predecessors, are essentially trying to cast aside the literary 'survivals' of effete conditions, and succeed so far as they could find adequate expression for the great ideas of their time.