[Footnote 64: Another of Greene's tales, possessing much the same merits and the same defects as those already mentioned is "Never too Late."]

[Footnote 65: Shakespeare's Celia.]

[Footnote 66: Act I, sc. 3.]

[Footnote 67: "Miscellanea," part ii, essay iv.]

[Footnote 68: Gray's "Life of Sidney," p. 8.]

[Footnote 69: "Pierce Penniless."]

[Footnote 70: Folio, 1622. p. 6.]

[Footnote 71: Folio, 1622, p. 10.]

[Footnote 72: Folio, p. 130.]

[Footnote 73: Folio, p. 115.]

[Footnote 74: Folio, p. 260.]

[Footnote 75: See an "Answer in 'Eikon Basilike,'" Milton's Works, Symmons' ed., v. 2, p. 408.]

[Footnote 76: Folio, p. 248.]

[Footnote 77: Folio, p. 116.]

[Footnote 78: Folio, p. 231.]

[Footnote 79: Book iii.]

[Footnote 80: "Morte d'Arthur," book x, chap. 12.]

[Footnote 81: A Scotchman named Barclay published a partly political and partly heroic volume called "Argenis" in 1621. It was much commended by Cowper the poet, but being written in Latin, is hardly to be included in English fiction. See Dunlop, chap. x. Francis Godwin wrote a curious story about 1602, called "The Man in the Moon," in which is described the journey of one Domingo Gonzales to that planet. Dunlop ("Hist. of Fiction") thought Domingo to be the real author. See chapter xiii. This romance is chiefly remarkable for its scientific speculations, and the adoption by the author of the Copernican theory. It was translated into French, and imitated by Cyrano de Bergerac, who in his turn was imitated by Swift in Brobdignag. See Hallam, "Lit. of Europe," vol 3, p. 393.]



CHAPTER IV.

THE PURITANS. BUNYAN'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS."

I.

The renaissance of learning, with its delight in a sense of existence, its enjoyment of a new life, a newly acquired knowledge, and a quickened intelligence, was gradually supplanted by that renaissance of religion which followed the general introduction of the Bible among the English people. Weary of the oppression of the clergy, weary of giving an often ruinous obedience to the tyranny of men whose lives gave them no claim to control the conduct of others, the early Puritan found in the Bible the knowledge of God and the means of grace which he despaired of obtaining from the priest. The Bible became in reality The Book. It was the one volume possessed and read by the people at large. The classical authors, the volumes of translations issued in Elizabeth's time, the productions, even, of English genius had been familiar only to the upper and best-educated classes. The great body of the people were without books, and the Bible became their one literary resource, and the sole teacher of the conditions by which salvation could be attained. It was seized upon with extraordinary avidity and enthusiasm. Old men learned to read, that they might study it for themselves. Crowds gathered in churches and private houses to hear it read aloud. A good reader became a public benefactor. Alike in manor and in cottage, the family gathered at night to listen with awe-struck interest to the solemn words whose grandeur was not yet lessened by familiarity. As we quote, often unconsciously, from a hundred different authors, the Puritans quoted from their one book.[82] Some, like Bunyan, at first preferred the historical chapters. But the Bible soon came to have a far more powerful and absorbing interest than any of a literary nature. There men looked for their sentence of eternal life or eternal torment. There they sought the solution of the question: "What shall I do to be saved?" And they sought it with all the fervor of conscientious men who realized, as we cannot realize, the doctrine of eternal damnation. To understand the influence of the Bible, we must remember how completely men believed in a personal God, ruling England then, as He had ruled Israel of old; and in a devil who stalked through the world luring men to their perdition. The Bible was studied with a fearful eagerness for the way to please the one and to escape the other. Looked upon as the word of God, pointing out the only means of salvation, men placed themselves, through the Bible, in direct communication with the Deity, and, casting aside the authority of a church, acknowledged responsibility to Him alone. The difficulty of interpreting obscure portions of the Scriptures drove many to frenzy and despair. A hopeful or consoling passage was hailed with joy. "Happy are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." "Lo," wrote Tyndale, "here God hath made a covenant wyth us, to mercy full unto us, yf we wyll be mercy full one to another."

Thus two ideas became paramount: the idea of God, and the idea of conscience. God was thought of as a judge who will reward His chosen servants by eternal happiness, but who will deliver those who do not know Him, or those who sin against His laws, to Satan and everlasting fire; a God to please whom is the first object of this life, as no pleasure and no pain here can compare with the pleasure or pain to come. This conception of the Deity still survives among us, but it is not realized with the intensity of men who feel the hand of God in every incident of their lives, who fancy that the Devil in person is among them, and who distinctly hear his tempting words. Conscience, the guide who pointed out the path of rectitude, became strict and self-searching, ever looking inwardly, and judging harshly, magnifying, through the greatness of its ideal of virtue, every failing into a crime. The natural result of these ideas seething in a brain which had little other food was Puritanism: the subordination of all other interests of life to the attainment of a spiritual condition acceptable in the sight of God. Following this aim with feverish intentness, and tortured by a conscience of extreme tenderness, the Puritans naturally cast aside the pleasures of this life as likely to interfere with the attainment of future happiness, and as worthless compared to it. It was no time for gaiety and trifling when the horrors of hell were staring them in the face.

There is extant a life-like picture of a London housewife, which can teach us much regarding the spirit of Puritanism.[83] "She was very loving and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her husband, very tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of sobriety unto many, very seldom was seen abroad, except at church. When others recreated themselves, at holidays and other times, she would take her needlework, and say, 'here is my recreation.'"

The self-denial of this virtuous housewife developed into that austerity which, when Puritanism had become the ruling power in England, closed the theatre and the bear-garden, stopped the dancing on the village green, and assumed a dress and manner, the sombreness of which was meant to signify a scorn of this world. While we can now easily perceive the mistakes of the Puritans, and condemn the folly of prohibiting innocent amusements which form a natural outlet for exuberant spirits, it will be well if we can do justice to the nobility of aim, and the greatness of self-sacrifice, to which their austerity was due. We must remember that the aim of the Puritans was a godliness far more exacting than that which we seek, and requiring a proportionate sacrifice of immediate pleasure. We must remember, too, that the amusements of that time were in large part brutal, like the bear-gardens; and licentious, like most of the theatres. Puritanism could only exist among men filled to an uncommon degree with a love of virtue, who were ready to undergo every hardship, and to sacrifice every personal inclination to attain it. Growing up among the people at large, Puritanism showed a strong national love of religion and morality. The resolution with which its devotees pursued their aims, the serene content with which the martyrs welcomed the flames which were to open the gates of Heaven, were backed by a strength of faith not exceeded by that of the early Christians. The self-control and self-sacrifice of the Puritans moulded the armies of the Commonwealth, and overthrew the tyranny of Charles. But their finer qualities were clouded by the fanaticism which a long persecution had engendered. A phrase in our description of the London housewife unconsciously tells the story: "Loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." The godly were the sharers of her own faith, the "wicked and profane" were all those without its pale. Here lay the weakness of Puritanism: its narrowness, its lack of sympathy with the world at large, its indifference to the sufferings of those who had no place in the ranks of the elect.

Among such men we must look in vain for literary productions having the aim of entertainment. The literature of the time was chiefly polemical, and commentaries crowded on the book-shelves the volumes of classical and Italian writers. To Puritanism, fiction was the invention of the Evil One, but still to Puritanism we owe, what is now, and seems destined ever to remain, the finest allegory in the English language.

[Footnote 82: See Green's "Short History of the English People," chap. viii, sec. 1.]

[Footnote 83: John Wallington's description of his mother. Green's "Short History of the English People," p. 451.]



II.

That John Bunyan, a poor, illiterate tinker, was able to take the first place among writers of allegory, and to accomplish the extraordinary intellectual feat of producing a work which charmed alike the ignorant, who could not perceive its literary merits, and cultivated critics, who viewed it only from a literary standpoint, depended partly on his own natural gifts, and partly on the character of Puritan thought. To write a good allegory requires an imagination of unusual power. It requires, in addition, a realization of the subject sufficiently strong to give to immaterial and shadowy forms a living personality. These conditions were combined in Bunyan's case to an unexampled degree. He possessed an imagination the activity of which would have unsettled the reason of any less powerfully constituted man. His subject, the doctrine of salvation by grace, was, by the absorbing interest then attached to it, impressed upon his mind with a vividness difficult to conceive. In "Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners," Bunyan left a description of his life, and the workings of his mind on religious subjects, which is without a parallel in autobiography. The veil which hides the thoughts of one man from another is withdrawn, and the reader is placed in the closest communion with the mind of the writer. In "Grace Abounding" is easily detected the secret of Bunyan's success in allegory. "My sins did so offend the Lord, that even in my childhood He did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions. I have been in my bed greatly afflicted, while asleep, with apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then thought, labored to draw me away with them, of which I could never be rid. I was afflicted with thoughts of the Day of Judgment, night and day, trembling at the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell fire." One Sunday, "as I was in the midst of a game at cat, and having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to Hell?' At this I was put to an exceeding maze; wherefore leaving my cat on the ground, and looking up to Heaven, saw, as with the eyes of my understanding, Jesus Christ looking down upon me very hotly displeased with me, and severely threatening me with some grievous punishment for my ungodly practices. * * * I cannot express with what longing I cried to Christ to call me. I saw such glory in a converted state that I could not be contented without a share therein. Had I had a whole world it had all gone ten thousand times over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state." After Bunyan's conversion he says of his conscience: "As to the act of sinning, I was never more tender than now. I durst not take up a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch. I could not tell how to speak my words for fear I should misplace them."

A man so sensitive to supernatural impressions could realize them as completely as the actual experiences of his daily life. Such, in fact, they were. With a conscience so tender, and a longing so intense for what he considered a condition of grace, Bunyan described the journey of Christian with the minuteness and fidelity of one who had trod the same path. The sketch of the pilgrim, which opens the work, stamps Christian at once an individual.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the Book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he broke out with a lamentable cry, saying "what shall I do?"

The same impression of reality pervades the whole work. Christian's sins take an actual form in the burden on his back. Every personage whom he meets on his journey, and every place through which he passes appears to the mind of the reader with the vividness of actual experience. The child or the laborer reads the "Pilgrim's Progress" as a record of adventures undergone by a living man; the scholar forgets the art which has raised the picture before his mind, in a sense of contact with the subject portrayed. This is the triumph of a great genius, and it is a triumph to which no other writer has attained to the same degree. Other allegorists have pleased the fancy or gratified the understanding, but Bunyan occupies at once the imagination, the reason and the heart of his reader. Defoe's power of giving life to fictitious scenes and personages has not been surpassed by that of any other novelist. But Defoe's scenes and characters were of a nature familiar to his readers, and therefore easily realized. In the "Pilgrim's Progress," strange and unreal regions become well-known places, and moral qualities distinct human beings. Evangelist, who puts Christian on the way to the Wicked Gate; Pliable, who deserts him at the first difficulty; Help, who pulls him out of the Slough of Despond; Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who shows him an easy way to be rid of his burden, are all life-like individuals. Timorous, Talkative, Vain Confidence, Giant Despair, are not mere personifications, but distinct human beings with whom every reader of the "Pilgrim's Progress" feels an intimate acquaintance. Not less real is the impression produced by the various scenes through which the journey of Christian conducts him. The Slough of Despond, the Wicket Gate, the House of the Interpreter, the Hill Difficulty, have been familiar localities to many generations of men, who have watched Christian's struggle with Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation, and followed his footsteps as they trod the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as they passed through the dangers of Vanity Fair, and brought him at last to the Celestial City, and the welcome of the Shining Ones.

The "Pilgrim's Progress" and the "Holy War" are not as allegories entirely perfect, but they probably gain in religious effect, as much as they lose from a literary point of view, in those passages where the allegorical disguise is not sustained. The simplicity and power of their language are alone sufficient to give them an important place in English literature. Throughout the "Pilgrim's Progress" are evidences of a strong human sympathy, and a kindly indulgence on the part of the author for the weak and erring among his fellow-men. Ignorance, to be sure, is cast into the bottomless pit; but as the work taught a spiritual perfection, it could not afford to encourage the willingly ignorant by bestowing a pardon on their representative. Bunyan himself was distinguished for a general sympathy with his fellow-men which the narrowness of Puritanism had failed to impair. The sad words in which he mourned, while in prison, his long separation from his wife and children, show the natural tenderness of his disposition, as well as the greatness of the sacrifice which he was making for his religion:—"The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bones; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I often brought to mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family was like to meet with; especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all I had beside."

With the allegories of Bunyan, we leave ideality behind us as a characteristic feature of English fiction. The knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood and his merry men, the princes and princesses of the "Arcadia," the pilgrim Christian, were the ideal heroes of the particular periods to which they belong. They were placed amid the scenes which seemed most attractive, and were endowed with the qualities which seemed most admirable to the men whose imaginations created them. But, with the exception perhaps of Robin Hood, they were purely ideal, without prototypes in nature. The writer of fiction had not yet turned his attention to the delineation of character, to the study of complex social questions, to the portrayal of actual life. With the fall of Puritan power, begins a great intellectual change. History shows, since the Restoration, a tendency which has continuously grown stronger and wider, to subordinate the imagination to the reason of man, to withdraw political and social questions from the influence of mere tradition, to subject them instead, to the test of practical experience, and to encourage the patient physical investigations which have resulted in the triumphs of modern science. This tendency has pervaded all the channels of human industry. Its effect upon works of fiction has been to introduce into that department of literature, a spirit of realism, and a love of investigating the problems of life and character, which have resulted in the modern novel. Henceforth we shall meet no more ideal beings, but men or women, more or less true to nature. In the fiction of the Restoration are first observable the new tendencies, which, although but slightly marked at first, have finally given to the English novel its present importance. An attempt to trace the gradual perfection of this form of literature, its development into a work of art, into a natural history of men, into a truthful reflection of very varied social conditions, will occupy the remainder of this volume.



CHAPTER V.

THE RESTORATION. ROGER BOYLE. MRS. MANLEY. MRS. BEHN.

I.

The Puritans had overthrown the political tyranny of Charles, but in attempting to build up by force a kingdom of the saints on earth, they had established a spiritual tyranny, quite as irksome and quite as perishable, of their own. Meanwhile they had failed to preserve the reputation for sanctity which formed the chief basis of their authority. As soon as they had attained power, they were joined by men who professed their principles merely for selfish purposes; who vied with each other in presenting to the world the outward signs of Puritanism, and remained notoriously profligate in life and character. The kingdom of the saints, objectionable as a tyranny, and finally identified in the popular mind with a hated hypocrisy, came to its inevitable end in the reaction of the Restoration. But when the first fury of this reaction had passed away, it was evident that Puritanism survived it: no longer a political power, but a moral influence which controlled the great body of the people, and gave to English habits and literature their distinctive tone of serious morality.

But for the time, all sight of this was lost. The entry of Charles II into Whitehall was the sign for unlimited indulgence in all that had lately been forbidden. "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop."[84] The Puritans had pent up for so long the natural cravings for pleasure and gaiety, that, when the barriers were withdrawn, license and debauchery were necessary to satisfy appetites which a long-enforced abstinence had made abnormal. In Vanburgh's "Provoked Wife," a comedy, like so many others of the time, at once very immoral and very entertaining, Sir John Brute thus excuses the virtues of his early life: "I was afraid of being damned in those days; for I kept sneaking, cowardly company, fellows that went to church, said grace to their meat, and had not the least tincture of quality about them." Heartfree: "But I think you have got into a better gang now." Sir John: "Zoons, sir, my Lord Rake and I are hand in glove."[85] In the country, people were generally satisfied with getting back their May-poles and Sunday games. But in London, where the rule of Puritanism had been the strictest, and above all among the courtiers, the new liberty resulted in a license and shamelessness unequalled in English history.

In the general proscription of Puritan ideas, the good were involved in the same destruction as the bad. Religion was mocked at as a cloak for hypocrisy, self-restraint was thrown aside as an obstacle to enjoyment. It was thought that emancipation from Puritan tyranny could not be attained more effectually than by a life of open licentiousness; by gambling and drunkenness. Such, under the Restoration, were the occupations most attractive to the gentlemen of fashion. Buckingham, Rochester, and the troop of courtiers who looked to them for an example, spent their lives in sinking into an ever deeper depravity. Their thoughts and mouths were never clean. The verses they wrote are too foul to transcribe as an illustration of the taste of their composers. The orgies in which they indulged were not scenes of gaiety, in which buoyant spirits and lively wit might excuse excess, but were serious, bestial, and premeditated. The dealings of these men with the female sex were but a succession of low intrigues, which destroyed all sentiment and left nothing but disgust behind them. We hear a great deal about "love" in the literature of the time, but it is the same kind of love that might be found among a herd of cattle. It would be difficult to mention any man about the court of Charles II who could have appreciated the pure and enduring passion which in the century before had breathed through the noble lines of Spenser's "Epithalamion," and in the century that followed inspired "John Anderson, my jo' John." Charles himself, "the old goat," set an example which hardly needed the authority of the Lord's anointed to become attractive. Without honor or virtue himself, and denying their existence in others, he made a fitting leader of the society about him. His mistresses insulted the queen by their splendor and arrogance, and insulted him by amours with servants and mountebanks. So destitute of dignity or principle as to share the Duchess of Cleveland with the world, he coolly asked a courtier who was reputed to be on too intimate terms with the queen, how his "mistress" did. While the gaming-tables at court were nightly covered with gold, and Lady Castlemaine gambled away thousands of pounds at a sitting, the exchequer was closed amid a widespread ruin, and the menial servants about the court were in want of bread. So openly was the king's coarse licentiousness pursued, that "the very sentrys speak of it," that the queen rarely entered her dressing-rooms without first being assured that the king was not there with one of his women. Such an example had a powerful influence upon all the rank and fashion of the time, already predisposed to a similar course. The extent of the prevailing reverence for royalty is admirably illustrated by the scene in which the Earl of Arlington advised Miss Stewart concerning her conduct as mistress of the king, to which position "it had pleased God and her virtue to raise her." Thus from the popular dislike of Puritanism, and the example of a profligate court, began that reign of social and political corruption which for a hundred years demoralized the manners and sullied the literature of the English people. The vice which became so engrafted on the habits of private life as to make decency seem an affectation, invaded religion and politics. To religion it brought about a general indifference, which in the higher ranks of the clergy took effect in disregard of their duties and in a shameless scramble for lucrative posts, and in the lower ranks produced poverty and social degradation. In politics are to be dated from this reign the gross corruption which enabled every public officer, however high or however low, to use his position for the purpose of private plunder, and the habit of bribing members of Parliament which soon converted them into tools of the crown's ministers.

While the men found their greatest enjoyment and most congenial occupation in drunkenness, duelling, and seduction, it is not to be expected that women should have retained an unappreciated refinement. Half-naked and ornamented with a profusion of jewels, they look out from the portraits of the time with a sleepy, voluptuous expression, which suggests a lack of intelligence and too great a susceptibility to physical impressions. Women as we find them in contemporary memoirs, and these most often deal with such as are about the court, are not unfit companions for the men. We see not a few the willing victims of coarse intrigues, and some even assisting in the degradation of others of their sex. Many of them swore "good mouth filling oaths," and the scandal they talked would have shocked the taste as well as the principles of Elizabeth's time. In the eighteenth century much coarseness is to be seen in literature and society, but we are constantly meeting with the words "delicacy" and "indelicacy" in their application to social refinement, and it is evident that the ideas of that time on this subject differ from ours only in degree. Under the Restoration, these words, or the thoughts they represent, had a very insignificant existence. Public taste inclined to the gross and the sensual, and welcomed as enjoyable, what the present discards as disgusting. Ladies of the highest rank sat through plays of which the purpose and effect was to degrade their own womanhood, to remove from the minds of the men who sat about and watched their countenances at each new obscenity, whatever respect for the sex might have lingered there. Some wore masks to hide the blushes which might have been looked for as a drama proceeded, which represented every female character on the stage as little better than an animal, using such reason as she possessed only to further the gratification of her appetites. Under such conditions there could be no encouragement for maiden modesty, and for old age no crown.

It is usually unfair to judge a community by its theatre, to which an exceptional liberty must always be allowed. But the drama of the Restoration may be said to reflect with much truth the popular taste. For the noblest efforts of dramatic genius the student turns by preference to the age of Elizabeth. There he finds art, beauty, and poetry; there he finds human nature, with its nobility and its littleness, with its virtues and its vices. The time of Charles II was as narrow in its way as the Puritans had been in theirs, and was as little capable of forming broad and just views of mankind. The Puritans, if they had had a stage, would have represented man as an embodiment of moral qualities. The dramatists of the Restoration made him merely a creature subject to animal desires and brutish instincts, which he made no effort to regulate. "It might, not be easy perhaps," says Hallam, "to find a scene in any comedy of Charles II's reign, where one character has the behavior of a gentleman, in the sense we attach to the word."[86] The stage was in perfect accord with its audience. Morality was outraged by a constant association of virtue with all that is contemptible and of vice with all that is attractive. Taste was outraged by a perpetual choice of degraded subjects and disgusting scenes. Nature was outraged by the representation of man, not as a complex being, worthy of deep and skilful investigation, but as a creature influenced by two or three passions always apparent on the surface. Thus the dramatists, notwithstanding their very exceptional abilities, produced little of enduring value, and nothing which could outlive a change in the popular taste. They did, however, produce what was greatly admired by their contemporaries: and the fact that the men and the women of the time enjoyed the plays provided for them, shows that they preferred to noble and elevating subjects, the literary reproduction of their own corrupt lives. The theatre no doubt represented men as worse than they were. But the friends of Buckingham and Rochester, both male and female, found in its long list of unprincipled men, of married women debauched, and of young girls anxious to be debauched, the reflection and justification of their own careers.

Posterity remembers little of the reign or the theatre of Charles II beyond their corruption. Yet there is much that is worthy of remembrance, without which any remarks on the social condition of the time would be one-sided. There are to be referred to that period many legislative enactments in the highest degree conducive to civil and religious liberty. The foundation of the Royal Society marked the inauguration of a new interest in speculative enquiry, of a great activity in scientific research, and of a broader and more liberal habit of thought on questions connected with government and education. These advantages were attained in spite of a worthless king, of corrupt ministers, and a licentious court, and they are due to the earnestness and vigor of the great body of the English people, qualities which have remained unchanged through every national vicissitude or success. While Pepys and Grammont supply full details of the moral degeneration which weakened and debased the highest ranks of society, the sound morality, steady industry, and progressive nature of the nation are to be seen in the journal of the good Evelyn. His character and occupations, as well as those of his friends, offset the coarse tastes and worthless lives which brought the time into discredit. To the prevailing disregard of the marriage tie may well be contrasted the happiness of Evelyn's domestic life. His daughter, of whom he has left a beautiful description, was endowed with an elevation of character, a charm of disposition, and a purity of thought admirable in any age, and it cannot be doubted that she had many contemporary parallels.

[Footnote 84: Destouches, "Glorieux," v. 3.]

[Footnote 85: Act ii, sc. 1.]

[Footnote 86: "Literature of Europe," vol. 4, chap. 6, sec. 2-47.]



II

With the pensions and fashions which were sent across the Channel from the court of Louis XIV, came a curious species of fiction which had a temporary vogue in England. Gomberville, Scuderi, and Calprenede had created the school of Heroic Romance by the publication of those monumental works which the French not inaptly termed "les romans de longue haleine." This was the bulky but enervated descendant of chivalric and pastoral romance. The tales of chivalry and of pastoral life had their raison d'etre. The feudal knighthood found in the tournaments, in the adventures of knight-errantry, and in the supernatural agencies which filled their volumes of romance, the reflection of their own aspirations and beliefs. They admired in the ideal characters of Charlemagne and Arthur the qualities most valued among themselves. Martial glory was to them the chief object of life; love was simply the reward of valor. The pastoral romance followed in less warlike times. Its subject was love; and that passion was usually described amidst humble and peaceful shepherds, where its strength and charm could develop more fully than amidst scenes of war and tumult. Both the chivalric and the pastoral romance were the embodiment of ideals which in turn represented contemporary tastes. But heroic romance, although it shared some of the characteristics of its predecessors, had not the same claim to interest. It was unnatural and artificial, rather than ideal. It imitated the martial character of the tales of chivalry, but subordinated that character to love. It imitated the devoted strain of adoration which ran through the fanciful phrases of pastoral fiction; but that artificial passion which seemed appropriate to ideal shepherds tuning their pipes under a perpetual sunshine, became absurd when applied to Greek or Carthaginian soldiers.

Gomberville's "Polexander," complete-in six thousand pages, and Calprenede's "Cassandra," "the fam'd romance," are now before me. Greeks, Romans, Turks, Parthians, Scythians, Babylonians are mingled together in a truly heroic structure of absurdity and anachronism. Artaxerxes appears on one page, the queen of the Amazons on the next, then the king of Lacedaemon, Alexander the Great, even a prince of Mexico, and comparatively private persons beyond computation. This crowd of names represent personages who imitate the deeds of chivalry, and converse in the affected style of the French court, while their ancient bosoms are distracted by a pure, all-absorbing, and never-dying love as foreign to their nature as to that of the readers of heroic romance. That this species of fiction should have met with any success, is largely due to the circumstance, that under the disguise of Greek warriors or Parthian princesses, there were really described contemporary beauties and courtiers, who fondly believed that they had attained, through the genius of Calprenede and Scuderi, an enviable immortality. Unhappily for them, the characters of heroic romance have found in that endless desert of phraseology at once their birthplace and their tomb.

The works of Gomberville, Calprenede, and Scuderi, although little adapted to the English taste, shared the favor which was extended to every thing French, and were both translated and imitated. The "Eliana," published in 1661; although a bona-fide imitation, would have served much better as a caricature. To the absurdity of incident is added an absurdity of language which gives the book almost a comic aspect. The beauty of flowers growing in the fields is disguised under the statement that Flora "spreads her fragrant mantle on the superficies of the earth, and bespangles the verdant grass with her beauteous adornments." A lover "enters a grove free from the frequentations of any besides the ranging beasts and pleasing birds, whose dulcet notes exulsecrate him out of his melancholy contemplations."[87]

Dunlop considered the best work of this description to be the "Parthenissa," published in 1664, by Roger Boyle, afterward Earl of Orrery. This romance, although marked by the faults of prolixity and incongruity characteristic of the heroic style, is not without narrative interest or literary merit. The hero is Artabanes, a Median prince, as usual "richly attired, and proportionately blessed with all the gifts of nature and education." At the Parthian court he becomes enamored of the beautiful Parthenissa, and in her honor performs many distinguished deeds of arms. Distracted, however, at the suspicion of Parthenissa's preference for a rival, he leaves the Parthian court with the determination to spend the remainder of his life on the summit of the Alps. This intention is frustrated by pirates, who take him prisoner and bestow him as a slave upon their chief. Artabanes soon escapes from bondage, suddenly turns out to be the historic Spartacus, and returns to Asia. There he finds that Parthenissa, to avoid the importunities of an objectionable lover, has swallowed a potion which gives her the appearance of death. In this dilemma he journeys to "the Temple of Hieropolis in Syria, where the Queen of Love had settled an oracle as famous as the Deity to whom it was consecrated." The priest of this temple, after listening patiently to the long account of Artabanes' misfortunes, tells the story of his own remarkable career, by which it appears that he is Nicomedes, king of Bythinia, the father of Julius Caesar's Nicomedes. While Artabanes is listening to this narrative, he sees two persons land upon the shore, and enter a neighboring wood. One is a young knight, and the other the exact counterpart of Parthenissa. At this apparition Artabanes is thrown into the greatest confusion. The lady he has seen presents every outward appearance of his mistress, and yet he believes her dead, and is unable to conceive that if living, she should so far forget her duty to him and the rules of propriety, as to place herself in so suspicions a position. Here the romance comes to an abrupt end, leaving Artabanes in the condition of painful uncertainty in which he has ever since remained.

Heroic romance proved as ephemeral in England as the cloaks and feathers with which it had crossed the Channel, and we may pass over such trivial literary attempts as those of the Duchess of Newcastle to the writings of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Behn. These two novelists, if such they may still be called, represent, in narrative fiction, the period which extends from the Restoration to the opening of the eighteenth century. They have left us little, and that of very indifferent merit. But their stories have a certain importance, inasmuch as with them begins the tendency, in English fiction, to deal with the actual, instead of the imaginary, to describe characters and scenes meant to represent real life.

The daughter of Sir Roger Manley, at one time Governor of Guernsey, Mrs. Manley was seduced, when quite a young woman, and passed the remainder of her life in a licentiousness which has evidently inspired her literary productions. Having picked up a few stories from current report, she worked them into what she called "The Power of Love, in Seven Novels."[88] The "love" here described is an unregulated animal passion, and its "power" is the natural effect of such a passion upon men and women who have no idea of self-restraint or refinement. The result is a series of licentious scenes, unredeemed by any literary merit. Mrs. Manley's most prominent work was the "Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean." This book is a scandalous chronicle of crimes reputed to have been committed by persons of high rank, and the names are so thinly disguised as to be easily identified. Mrs. Manley was arrested and prosecuted for the publication, but escaped without serious punishment. The work itself had a wide circulation, and Pope adopted the endurance of its fame as a measure of time in his shortsighted line, "As long as Atalantis shall be read."

In the beginning of this book a female personage named Astraea resolves to revisit the earth, which she had long before abandoned in disgust. She alights upon an island in the Mediterranean, named Atalantis, which is meant to signify England, and a female form immediately rises up before her.

Her habit obsolete and torn, almost degenerated into tatters; But her Native Charms, that needed not the Help of Art, gave to Astraea's returning Remembrance that it could be no other than her beautiful Mother Vertue. But oh! how despicable her Garments! how neglected her flowing Hair! How languid her formally animated Eyes! How pale, how withered the Roses of her lovely Cheeks and Lips! How useless her snowy arms and polished Fingers! they hung in a melancholy Decline, and seemed out of other Employment, but sometimes to support the Head of the dejected Fair One! Her limbs enervated and supine, wanting of that Energy which should bear her from a Solitude so affrighting!

From this very accurate description of the condition of virtue at the end of the seventeenth century, it might be supposed that Mrs. Manley deplored her neglected state. But such is far from being the case. Astraea and Virtue meet with a personage called Intelligence, who furnishes them with a detailed account of current scandal calculated to still further depress the dejected Virtue. The trio are soon joined by Mrs. Nightwork, a midwife, who never breaks an oath of secrecy unless it be to her interest, and the character of whose contributions to the general fund of gossip may be easily imagined. This semi-allegorical method of narration is kept up during the first two volumes; in the third and fourth Mrs. Manley tells her story in her own way. In the course of these four volumes is unrolled an extraordinary series of crimes, some unnatural, and all gross in highest degree. The details which Mrs. Manley could not obtain from authentic sources are supplied by her vivid and heated imagination. She gloats over each incident with a horrible relish, and adds, with no unsparing brush, a heightened color to each picture. Only a society whose conduct could afford material for this composition could possibly have read it. Mrs. Manley no doubt invented and exaggerated without scruple, but the fact that her work was widely read and even popular is a sufficient commentary on the taste of the time. The reader of to-day is sickened by the multiplication of repulsive scenes, and the absence from the book of any good qualities or actions whatever. The style in which the "Atalantis" is written is so mean, that no person could have derived any pleasure from its pages other than the gratification of a depraved taste.

A writer of fiction of much greater importance appeared in the person of Aphra Johnson, more generally known as Mrs. Behn, or "the divine Astraea"; "a gentlewoman by birth, of a good family in the city of Canterbury." Her father was appointed to a colonial office in the West Indies, where he took his family while Mrs. Behn was yet a young girl. There the future authoress began a chequered life by living on a plantation among rough and lawless colonists, and there she made the acquaintance of the slave Oroonoko, whose sad story she afterward made known to the world. On her return to England, she married Behn, a merchant of Dutch extraction, and went to live in the Netherlands, where she acted as a British spy. By working upon the feelings of her lovers, she was able to convey information to the English government of the intention of the Dutch to enter the Thames to destroy the English fleet. Her warnings were disregarded, and giving up her patriotic occupation, she returned to London, and devoted herself to literature. She died in 1689, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey:—"Covered only with a marble stone, with two wretched verses on it." Although Mrs. Behn is now almost forgotten, her position in her own time was not inconsiderable. Besides a number of letters and poems, her literary productions include a translation of Fontenelle's "Plurality of Worlds," and a paraphrase on Van Dale's "De Oraculis Ethnicorum." Her plays met with some success, but were characterized by a licentiousness which won for her the title of "the female Wycherley," a fact, which, on account of her sex, called down upon her a general and well-deserved condemnation. Two other productions, of which the nature is sufficiently indicated by their titles, were "The Lover's Watch; or the Art of making Love: being Rules for Courtship for every Hour of the Day and Night"; and "The Ladies Looking Glass to dress themselves by; or the whole Art of charming all Mankind."

It was on Mrs. Behn's return from the West Indies that, being introduced at court, she related to Charles the Second the terrible fate of the noble slave Oroonoko. At the solicitation of the king, she put her narrative into the form of a novel, which obtained a large circulation, and was dramatized by Southern in his tragedy of the same name. "Oroonoko" is worthy of notice as one of the earliest attempts on the part of an English novelist to deal with characters which had come under the writer's observation in actual life. It is still more important on account of the presence within it of a didactic purpose; a characteristic which for good or for evil has been a prominent feature of the English novel. Sir Thomas More had made use of fiction in the sixteenth century to urge his ideas of political and social reforms. Bunyan, more than a century later, used the same means to promulgate his conception of Christian life. While English narrative fiction was still in its first youth, Mrs. Behn protested against the evils of the slave trade through the medium of a story which may be considered a forerunner of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

To interest the public in a distant country or an abstract principle, the novel is the most effective literary means. A treatise on the slave trade by Mrs. Behn, however strong and truthful, would have met with the little attention which is accorded to the sufferings of a distant and unknown people. But the novel has the advantage over the treatise, that it deals with the particular and not the general, with the individual and not the nation. It can place before the reader a limited number of persons; it can interest his mind and heart in their characters, lives, and fate; and by subjecting them to the horrors of the evil to be depicted, excite through commiseration for their sufferings a hatred of the cause which inflicted them. To such a use the novel has often been put, at too frequent a sacrifice of its artistic merit. To excite indignation against the results of the slave trade, Mrs. Behn took the special instance of Oroonoko. She endowed the African slave with beauty of person and nobility of character. She gave him tastes and qualities of a kind to attract the interest of a European reader. She added a description of his wife Imoinda, dwelling on the details of her beauty and charms. By a passionate relation of the amatory scenes which occurred between Oroonoko and his wife, she touched a key particularly calculated to excite contemporary English sympathy. Finally, by telling the story of the cruel wrongs inflicted on the slaves, she aroused a natural indignation against the system which could entail such evil results.

The story itself is briefly as follows. Oroonoko was a brave young chief, the grandson of a king whose dominions lay on the coast of Africa. He had distinguished himself in war, and already commanded all the forces of his grandfather's kingdom. Hitherto rather unsusceptible to female charms, he became deeply enamored of Imoinda, on returning victorious from a great war. Unfortunately the king noticed Imoinda at the same time, and had her brought to his palace as his concubine. According to the rules of the court, this would separate the lovers forever. Oroonoko in desperation made his way to Imoinda's chamber in the palace at night, where he was discovered by the king's servants. Imoinda was immediately sold as a slave. Oroonoko made his way down to the seashore, and was there allured, under false pretenses of hospitality, on board an English ship. He was carried to the West Indies, and sold to a planter of Surinam, the colony in which Mrs. Behn was living, and where by a remarkable chance Imoinda had already been sold. The beauty of Imoinda had brought about her a large number of suitors, all of whom met with a cold repulse. The tenderness of the meeting between Oroonoko and Imoinda prevailed upon their master to allow them to live together. But Oroonoko longed for liberty. He plotted a revolt among his fellow-slaves, and on its suppression was brutally flogged. Enraged by this, he escaped into the woods with Imoinda, who was then pregnant. Fearing that she might fall into the hands of the whites, and unwilling to be the father of a slave, he killed her, and remained by her dead body several days, half insensible with grief and without food. Again taken by the colonists, he was tied to a post, hacked to pieces and burned. The story, simple in itself, becomes striking in the hands of Mrs. Behn. The hut of the old negro king is given the brilliancy of an Eastern court, and his harem is copied after that of a Turkish potentate. When Oroonoko is induced to board the English slaver, it is in no common style, but "the Captain in his Boat richly adorned with Carpets and velvet Cushions went to the Shore to receive the Prince, with another Long Boat where was placed all his Music and Trumpets." Mrs. Behn's methods of adorning her tale are best shown by her description of Oroonoko himself, which is a good example of the tone in which the story is written.

I have often seen and conversed with this Great Man, and been a Witness to many of his mighty Actions: and do assure my Reader, the most illustrious Courts could not have produced a braver Man, both for Greatness of Courage and Mind, a Judgment more solid, a Wit more quick, and a Conversation more sweet and diverting. He knew almost as much as if he had read much; he had heard of and admired the Romans; he had heard of the late Civil Wars in England, and the deplorable Death of our great Monarch; and would discourse of it with all the Sense and abhorrence of the Injustice imaginable. He had an extremely good and graceful Mien, and all the civility of a well bred Great Man. He had nothing of Barbarity in his Nature, but in all Points addressed himself as if his Education had been in some European Court.

This great and just character of Oroonoko gave me an extreme Curiosity to see him, especially when I knew he spoke French and English, and that I could talk with him. But though I had heard so much of him, I was as greatly surprised when I saw him, as if I had heard nothing of him; so beyond all Report I found him. He came into the Room, and addressed himself to me and some other Women with the best Grace in the World. He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be fancyed: The most famous Statuary could not form the figure of a Man more admirably turned from Head to Foot. His face was not of that brown lusty Black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony or polished Jet. His Eyes were the most aweful that could be seen, and very piercing; the White of 'em being like Snow, as were his teeth. His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His Mouth the finest Shape that could be seen; far from those great turn'd Lips which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole Proportion and Air of his Face was nobly and exactly form'd, that bating his Colour, there would be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. There was no one Grace wanting that bears the Standard of true Beauty. His Hair came down to his Shoulders, by the aids of Art, which was by pulling it out with a quill, and keeping it comb'd; of which he took particular care. Nor did the perfections of his Mind come short of those of his Person; for his Discourse was admirable upon almost any Subject; and whoever had heard him speak, would have been convinced of their Errors, that all fine Wit is confined to the white Men, especially to those of Christendom; and would have confessed that Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, had as great a Soul, as politick Maxims, and was as sensible of Power, as any Prince civilized in the most refined Schools of Humanity and Learning, or the most illustrious Courts.[89]

"Oroonoko" is the only one of Mrs Behn's stories which has a didactic aim or a special interest of any kind. Her other works of fiction are short tales, usually founded on fact, which describe in unrestrained language the passion and adventures of a pair of very ardent lovers. They show the prevailing inclination in narrative fiction toward characters and scenes taken from actual life. But they have no interest apart from the slender thread of the story itself. They contain no studies of character, and no information of importance concerning contemporary manners. Their heroes and heroines differ from each other only in the intensity or the circumstances of their love. The best in narrative interest, and the most attractive in tone, is the "Lucky Mistake." It is without the grossness characteristic of Mrs. Behn's works, and gives quite a pretty account of the loves of a young French nobleman and an unusually modest young woman named Atlante. Mrs. Behn's notion of love is contained in the opening lines of the "Fair Jilt," the most licentious of her tales. "As Love is the most noble and divine Passion of the Soul, so it is that to which we may justly attribute all the real Satisfactions of Life; and without it Man is Unfinished and unhappy. There are a thousand Things to be said of the Advantages this generous Passion brings to those whose Hearts are capable of receiving its soft Impressions; for 'tis not Every one that can be sensible of its tender Touches. How many Examples from History and Observation could I give of its wondrous Power; nay, even to a degree of Transmigration! How many Idiots has it made wise! How many Fools eloquent! How many home-bred Squires accomplished! How many cowards brave!" There is no doubt that Mrs. Behn was fully alive to the strength of the passion she describes, but as Sir Richard Steele said, she "understood the practic part of love better than the speculative." In accordance with the views general amidst the society of her own time, she represented love merely as a physical passion, and made the interest of her stories depend on its gratification, and not on the ennobling effects or subtle manifestations of which it is capable.

There is a great deal in that well-known anecdote of Sir Walter Scott's, in which he relates that he "was acquainted with an old lady of family, who assured him that, in her younger days, Mrs. Behn's novels were as currently upon the toilette as the works of Miss Edgeworth at present; and described with some humor her own surprise, when the book falling into her hands after a long interval of years, and when its contents were quite forgotten, she found it impossible to endure, at the age of fourscore, what at fifteen, she, like all the fashionable world of the time, had perused without an idea of impropriety." This is a striking illustration of the mere relativeness of such words as "morality," "refinement," and their opposites. If this old lady could have lived over her early youth embued with the refinement of taste which surrounded her declining years, she would have been still more shocked at the coarseness of language, and the looseness of conduct and morals which prevailed among the highest ranks. At the same time she would have observed, that the society which appeared to her coarse and corrupt was far from so considering itself. What is gross to one age may have been the refinement of the last. A young girl considered modest and discreet at the end of the seventeenth century, if transferred unchanged to the end of the eighteenth, would have shocked the women she met with by talking of subjects unmentioned in society with a freedom and broadness unusual among the men. In judging a literary work from the point of view of morality or refinement, we must compare it with the standard of the age to which it belongs, and not with our own. Pope's graphic lines, in which he describes Mrs. Behn's position as a dramatist,

"The stage how loosely doth Astraea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed."

apply almost equally well to her novels. But still the contemporary reader found nothing in their pages to offend his sense of propriety. And Mrs. Behn, who simply put into a literary form ideas and scenes which were common in the society about her, cannot with justice be accused of an intention to pander to the lowest tastes of her readers. She said herself, when reproved for the tone of her plays, which was much inferior to that of her novels: "I make challenge to any person of common sense and reason, that is not wilfully bent on ill nature, and will, in spite of sense, wrest a double entendre from everything * * * but any unprejudiced person that knows not the author—to read one of my comedies and compare it with others of this age, and if they can find one word which can offend the chastest ear, I will submit to all their pevish cavills." All this is worthy of note, if we are to follow the course of English fiction without prejudice. For it will be shown that the nineteenth century, with all its well-deserved pride in an advanced refinement and morality, has produced a large number of novelists, both male and female, whose works are as immoral as those of Mrs. Behn, without her excuse. Who, with all the advantages accruing from life in a refined age, with every encouragement to pursue a better course, have deliberately chosen to court an infamous notoriety by making vice familiar and attractive. And this too, at a time when a general confidence in the purity of contemporary literary works has practically done away with parental censorship; when books of evil tendency are as likely to fall into the hands of the young and susceptible as those of elevating tendency—a circumstance which adds a new responsibility to the duties of the conscientious writer.

[Footnote 87: Dunlop's "History of Fiction," chap. iv.]

[Footnote 88: "The Fair Hypocrite," "The Physician's Stratagem," "The Wife's Resentment," "The Husband's Resentment," in two parts; "The Happy Fugitive," "The Perjured Beauty."]

[Footnote 89: "History of Oroonoko," Mrs. Behn's "Collected plays and novels."]



CHAPTER VI.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. I.—ENGLAND UNDER ANNE AND THE FIRST TWO GEORGES. II.—SWIFT, ADDISON, DEFOE. III.—RICHARDSON, FIELDING, SMOLLETT.

I.

The advance of a nation in numbers and civilization is accompanied by so great a complexity of social conditions that in this volume it is possible only to attempt to seize such salient characteristics of the eighteenth century as may serve to throw light on the course of English fiction. No age presents a more prosaic aspect. If we consider the condition of England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the prevalence of abuses and corruption left by the ignorance or vice of preceding years, and reflect at the same time upon the progressive nature of the people, the practical habit of their minds, and the moral earnestness which they never wholly lost, it is not surprising to find that the century is one of reforms. Population and wealth had outgrown the laws and customs which had hitherto served for their control, and though in the earlier part of the period we find corruption in public and private life, indifference in religion, inadequate provision for the education of the young, gross abuses in jurisprudence, and coarseness of action and taste throughout the social system, there is also perceptible a solid foundation of good-sense and an earnest desire for improvement, which gradually, as the century wore on, introduced one reform after another, until many of those benefits were attained or made possible which the present century almost unconsciously enjoys. We should lose one of the most instructive lessons which history can afford, if, with Carlyle, we should allow the eighteenth century to lie "massed up in our minds as a disastrous, wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon,"[90] The England of that century was modern England, but modern England, burdened with a heritage of corruption and ignorance which it is the glory of the time to have in large part discarded. It was a time of social and material progress, and it was also the period of the growth and perfection of English fiction. To thoroughly understand the one, we must be acquainted with the other, and it will be the object of the two following chapters to trace the development of the English novel in connection with that national development of which it will be shown to be in great measure the exponent.

That subordination of the imagination to reason, which, after the Restoration, became so marked in English thought on intellectual, political, and religious subjects, was continued in the eighteenth century with results which affected the whole current of national life. Before the light of physical science, silent but irresistible in its advances, faded away the remains of dogmatism and superstition. Astrology was forgotten in astronomy; belief in modern miracles and witchcraft ceased to take root in minds conscious of a universe too vast for realization, and governed by laws so regular, that probability could not attach to arbitrary interference by God or the devil. From the broadening of the intellectual horizon finally resulted inestimable benefits; but these benefits were purchased at the price of much temporary evil. If in religion, the rational tendencies prepared the way for the liberal and undogmatic Christianity to come, their effect for many years was to be seen only in scepticism, in a mocking indifference to religion itself, in a contempt of high moral aspirations and sentiments. If in politics, the final effect of these tendencies was to introduce new wisdom into government, they showed for long no other result than the suppression of all the higher qualities of a statesman, the disappearance of every sign of patriotism other than an ignorant hatred of foreign countries, the complete subversion of public spirit by private rapacity.

The prevailing intellectual characteristics are marked, in literature, by the great predominance of prose over poetry. It will be no disparagement to Pope, Prior, Gray, Collins, Akenside, Goldsmith, or Young, to say that they did not attain in poetry what in prose was attained by Swift, Defoe, Steele, Addison, Bolingbroke, Richardson, Fielding, Smollet, Hume, Gibbon, Junius, and Burke; while Goldsmith is as much valued for his prose as for his verse, Addison, Swift, and Johnson more so. It is to these men, and to contemporaries of lesser note, that English literature is indebted for the invention or perfection of prose forms of the highest importance and beauty. Defoe stands pre-eminent among the founders of the newspaper, destined to attain so high a degree of power and utility. Addison, Steele, and Johnson made the essay one of the most attractive and popular forms of literature. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole, Chesterfield, and Junius brought letter-writing to perfection. Defoe, Addison, Richardson, and Fielding developed the realistic novel. A prosaic and conventional tone pervaded even the poetry of the period. Appreciation of poetry was almost extinguished, Addison, writing of the poets of the past, made no mention of Shakespeare, and found it possible to say of Chaucer:

In vain he jests in his unpolish'd strain, And tries to make his readers laugh, in vain.

And of Spenser:

Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetick rage, In ancient tales amus'd a barb'rous age. But now the mystick tale that pleas'd of yore Can charm an understanding age no more.[91]

"If you did amuse yourself with writing any thing in poetry," wrote Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, in 1742, "you know how pleased I should be to see it; but for encouraging you to it, d'ye see, 'tis an age most unpoetical! 'Tis even a test of wit to dislike poetry; and though Pope has half a dozen old friends that he has preserved from the taste of last century, yet, I assure you the generality of readers are more diverted with any paltry prose answer to old Marlborough's secret history of Queen Mary's robes. I do not think an author would be universally commended for any production in verse, unless it were an ode to the Secret Committee, with rhymes of liberty and property, nation and administration."

During the brilliant era of literary activity, known by the name of Queen Anne, men of letters were encouraged by the government by means of employment or rewards. They were supported also by the public through the high social consideration which was freely accorded to men of talent. Literary success was a passport to the houses and the intimacy of the great. But under the first two Georges and the administration of Walpole the government was seconded by the public in its neglect of authors and their works. In those days the circle of readers was too small to afford remuneration to authorship. Employment or help from the government was almost a sine qua non for the production of works which required time and research. While under Anne, Swift received a deanery, Addison was Secretary of State, Steele a prominent member of Parliament, and Newton, Locke, Prior, Gay, Rowe, Congreve, Tickell, Parnell, and Pope all received direct or indirect aid from the government, in the reigns of George I and George II, Steele died in poverty, Savage walked the streets for want of a lodging, Johnson lived in penury and drudgery. Thomson was deprived of a small office which formed his sole dependence.[92] This neglect of authors and of literature was only partially due to an unappreciative government. It was supported by the indifference of a public in a high degree material and unintellectual. Conversation in France, said Chesterfield, "turns at least upon some subject, something of taste, some point of history, criticism, and even philosophy; which, though probably not quite so solid as Mr. Locke's, is, however, better and more becoming rational beings than our frivolous dissertations upon the weather or upon whist."

In keeping with the unimpassioned and prosaic tone of the time, was the low state of religious feeling, and the degeneration of the church, both in its own organization and in public esteem. The upper classes of society, as a rule, were lukewarm and insincere in any form of belief. Statesman and nobles in the most prominent positions combined professed irreligion with open profligacy, while the lower classes were left, through the indolence and selfishness of the clergy, almost without religious teaching. Montesquieu found that people laughed when religion was mentioned in London drawing-rooms. Sir Robert Walpole put the general feeling in his own coarse way. "Pray, madam," said he to the Princess Emily, when it was suggested that the archbishop should be called to the death-bed of Queen Caroline, "let this farce be played; the archbishop will act it very well. You may bid him be as short as you will. It will do the queen no hurt, no more than any good; and it will satisfy all the wise and good fools, who will call us all atheists if we don't pretend to be as great fools as they are."[93] This low state of religious sentiment was brought about by much the same causes which, at a later time, substituted a moral and liberal for the old dogmatic Christianity. The dislike of theological controversy left by the civil wars was aided by the Act of Toleration in giving the nation a religious peace, and in diverting human energy from religious speculations or emotions. The rational character of the national intellect was inclined to what was material and tangible, to physical study or industry. The general desire to submit all questions to the test of a critical reason, induced the clergy to apply the same test to theology. But while these tendencies, in their final result, were on the whole beneficial to religion, their temporary effect was injurious to it in a high degree. With a few exceptions, such as Butler, Berkeley, and Wilson, the clergy shared the indifference of their flocks. The upper ranks were indolent, selfish, often immoral; the lower, poor, ignorant, and degraded in social position. Bishops and prominent clergymen, under the system of pluralities, left their congregations to the care of hungry curates, and sought promotion by assiduous attendance at ministers' levees, or by paying court to the king's mistresses. It is not surprising that public respect for them and for their calling almost died away. Pope wrote sneeringly:[94]

EVEN in a BISHOP I can spy desert; Seeker is decent, Rundle has a heart.

A naked Venus hung in the room where prayers were read while Queen Caroline dressed, which Dr. Madox sarcastically termed "a very proper altar-piece."[95] Of the High Churchmen Defoe declared that "the spirit of Christianity is fled from among them." When the Prince of Wales died, George the Second appointed governors and preceptors for the prince's children. Horace Walpole's description[96] of one of these is significant. "The other Preceptor was Hayter, Bishop of Norwich, a sensible well-bred man, natural son of Blackbourn, the jolly old Archbishop of York, who had all the manners of a man of quality, though he had been a Buccaneer and was a Clergyman; but he retained nothing of his first profession except his seraglio."

While the attention of the upper clergy was largely absorbed by thoughts of private profit and by the pursuit of worldly advancement, the lower ranks were left in a position degrading alike to themselves and to religion. In the country a clergyman was little above a peasant in social consideration, and seldom equal to him in the comforts of life. To eke out the sustenance of himself and family, hard labor in his own garden was by no means the most menial of the services he was obliged to perform. His wife was usually a servant-maid taken from a neighboring country house, and the kitchen was his most common resort when he visited the home of a squire. A private chaplain was little above a servant. In London, many clergymen fell into the prisons through debt or crime. From the ranks of the lower clergy were recruited the "buck-parsons," so long a scandal to the church and to public morality; and the large body of "Fleet parsons," of infamous character, in the pay of gin shops and taverns, who, for a trifling sum, performed what were legal marriages between boys and girls, drunkards and runaways.

The corruption in political life, begun under the Restoration and increased during the Revolution, was amplified and reduced to a system under Walpole until government seemed to be based on bribery. Ridiculing public spirit and disinterested motives in others, he bribed George the Second with the promise of a large civil list, bribed Queen Caroline with a large allowance, bribed members of Parliament with sinecures, pensions, or with direct payment of money, and paid himself with wealth and a peerage. Corruption was so firmly rooted as an engine of power, that no serious discredit attached to it. So low had fallen the standard of political honor, so widespread had become the spirit of self-seeking and corruption among the ministers and in Parliament, that "Love of our country," wrote Browne, "is no longer felt; and except in a few minds of uncommon greatness, the principle of public spirit exists not."[97] The dominating idea of political life was well put in the words of the Marquis of Halifax: "Parties in a state, generally, like freebooters, hang out false colors; the pretence is public good, the real business is to catch prizes." Lord Hervey divided the Whig party in 1727 into "Patriots and Courtiers, which was in plain English, 'Whigs in place,' and 'Whigs out of place.'"[98] The assertion of disinterestedness met only with ridicule. In an interview with Queen Caroline, "when Lord Stair talked of his conscience with great solemnity, the queen (the whole conversation being in French) cried out: Ah, my Lord, ne me parlez point de conscience, vous me faites evanouir."[99] As personal advancement, and not the public service, was the ruling aim of statesmen, it is not surprising that for this advancement no means were regarded as too low. The king's mistresses were the object of ceaseless attentions from aspirants for office, and sometimes were the recipients of their bribes. Treachery was the order of the day. Bolingbroke said to Sir Robert Walpole, "that the very air he breathed was the gift of his bounty," and then left Sir Robert to tell the king that Walpole "was the weakest minister any prince ever employed abroad, and the wickedest that ever had the direction of affairs at home."[100] The Duke of Newcastle, that "living, moving, talking caricature," stands out an exaggerated type of the common statesmen of the time; "hereditary possessors of ennobled folly,"[101] maintained in offices which they had no capacity to fill by corruption, the abuse of patronage, and the control of rotten boroughs. Speaking of the Dukes of Devonshire, Grafton, and Newcastle, Lord Hervey says[102]: "The two first were mutes, and the last often wished so by those he spoke for, and always by those he spoke to." George the Second appreciated the character and objects of his advisers. He had, also, a frank and pointed way of describing them. In his opinion Sir Robert Walpole was "a great rogue"; Mr. Horace Walpole, ambassador to France, was a "dirty buffoon"; Newcastle, an "impertinent fool"; Lord Townshend, a "choleric blockhead";[103] while Lord Chesterfield was disposed of as a "tea-table scoundrel."[104] He complained that he was "obliged to enrich people for being rascals, and buy them not to cut his throat."[105] "The king and queen," wrote Hervey, "looked upon human kind as so many commodities in a market, which, without favor or affection, they considered only in the degree they were useful, and paid for them in that proportion—Sir Robert Walpole being sworn appraiser to their Majesties at all these sales."[106]

The cringing subserviency of political men was equal to their corruption. When George I died, and it was believed that Sir Spencer Compton would succeed to the power of Sir Robert Walpole, at the king's reception "Sir Robert walked through these rooms as if they had been still empty; his presence, that used to make a crowd wherever he appeared, now emptied every corner he turned to, and the same people who were officiously a week ago clearing the way to flatter his prosperity, were now getting out of it to avoid sharing his disgrace. Everybody looked upon it as sure, and whatever profession of adherence and gratitude for former favors were made him in private, there were none among the many his power had obliged (excepting General Churchill and Lord Hervey) who did not in public as notoriously decline and fear his notice, as they used industriously to seek and covet it."[107] On the same occasion, Horace Walpole tells us, "my mother * * * could not make her way (to pay her respects to the king and queen) between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor could approach nearer to the queen than the third or fourth row; but no sooner was she descried by her Majesty, than the queen cried aloud, 'There I am sure I see a friend!' The torrent divided and shrunk to either side: 'and as I came away,' said my mother, 'I might have walked over their heads if I had pleased.'"[108] The general corruption and wickedness produced a remarkable misanthropy in the minds of men, which is reflected in the savage satire of Swift, in the bitter invective of Junius, in the cynicism of Lord Hervey. Sir Robert Walpole, said the latter, "had more warmth of affection and friendship for some particular people than one could have believed it possible for any one who had been so long raking in the dirt of mankind to be capable of feeling for so worthless a species of animals. One should naturally have imagined that the contempt and distrust he must have had for the species in gross, would have given him at least an indifference and distrust toward every particular."[109]

The mercenary character of Parliament allowed the first two Georges to have much their own way as long as the money held out. Liberty of the subject, if not in great danger, had certainly lost its natural guardian. Few seats depended on a direct and popular vote. Most of them were in the gift of noblemen or rich commoners, "rotten boroughs," having only "the bare name of a town, of which there remains not so much as the ruins."[110] Defoe tells us that the market price of a seat was a thousand guineas. The object of the purchaser was less often the service of his country, or even an honorable ambition, than the profit to be made from the sale of his vote. Members not infrequently had regular salaries from the government. "Sir Robert Walpole and the queen both told me separately," wrote Lord Hervey, "that it (the victory of the court) cost the king but 900l.—500l. to one man, and 400l. to another; and that even those two sums were advanced to two men who were to have received them at the end of the session had this question never been moved, and who only took this opportunity to solicit prompt payment."[111] Lord Chesterfield, in the same letter in which he spoke of the corrupt influencing of elections as a high crime and misdemeanor, recommends the Earl of Marchmont to bribe "some of your venal peers" to confess that they took money to vote for the court.[112] "Ever since Lord Granville went out," wrote Horace Walpole in 1744, "all has been in suspense. The leaders of the Opposition immediately imposed silence upon their party; everything passed without the least debate, in short, all were making their bargains. One has heard of the corruption of courtiers, but, believe me the impudent prostitution of patriots, going to market with their honesty, beats it to nothing. Do but think of two hundred men of the most consummate virtue, setting themselves to sale for three weeks!"[113] The corruption of Parliament and the indifference, of members to any interests other than their own, were pointedly expressed by Queen Caroline in her reply to an address by Lord Stair[114]:—"I must, therefore, once more ask you, my Lord, how you can have the assurance to talk to me of your thinking the sense of constituents, their interests, or their instructions any measure or rule for the conduct of their representatives in Parliament. * * * To talk, therefore, in the patriot strain you have done to me on this occasion, can move me, my Lord, to nothing but laughter."

In the words of Mr. Lecky,[115] the government was "corrupt, inefficient, and unheroic, but it was free from the gross vices of continental administrations; it was moderate tolerant, and economical; it was, with all its faults, a free government, and it contained in itself the elements of reformation." The national industry and resolution, particularly in the middle classes, brought about a great increase of wealth, a remarkable development of manufactures and commerce, which gave the country the extraordinary prosperity which it has since, almost without a check, enjoyed. The external appearance of England presented a new aspect. A fourth part of the whole land was redeemed from waste and put under cultivation.[116] The advance in agriculture and manufactures, making necessary better means of communication, introduced canals and substituted fine highways for the old muddy, robber-infested roads. The condition of these as late as 1736 may be inferred from that of the road between Kensington and London: "The road between this place and London is grown so infamously bad, that we live here in the same solitude as we should do if cast on a rock in the middle of the ocean, and all the Londoners tell us there is between them and us a great, impassable gulf of mud. There are two roads through the Park, but the new one is so convex and the old one so concave, that by this extreme of faults they agree in the common one of being, like the high-road, impassable."[117]

Social life was marked by the same corruption, by the same absence of high aspirations and standards which we have seen in politics. The nation, especially the higher ranks, had not recovered from the license of the Restoration, while the agencies which can preserve virtue and refinement in a society were almost inactive. Religion, partly in consequence of the reaction which followed the civil wars, and partly in consequence of the spread of rational tendencies, had lost its hold on society, and no longer sufficed to keep it in check. Theological controversy, although it issue in narrowness and persecution, yet has the merit of keeping alive an appreciation of high moral qualities and aims. In the absence of strong religious feeling, there is yet in the human mind a natural preference for what is beautiful and honorable, usually taking the form of ideals, which may keep up a social tone. This may be seen in the age of Elizabeth, not a very religious period, but one in which poetry and elevation of thought overshadow coarseness and immorality. The nineteenth century, again, is neither marked by strong religious feelings nor by any great tendency to idealization. And yet the nineteenth century has its standard, firmly based on public opinion, made up of a respect for decency and justice, a love of refinement, and an appreciation of the expediency as well as the attractiveness of virtue; a standard which influences many minds over which religion has little control. But in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, religion had ceased to govern, and had not yet attained that moral influence which, even in the absence of strong faith, establishes rectitude of conduct, philanthropy, and purity of thought in the minds of men. The ideals and aspirations of preceding centuries had no meaning for what Addison called an "understanding age," and the standard of order, refinement and taste of the present had yet to come. The low state of society was realized and revolted against by the best minds of the time. Gay lampooned it in the "Beggars' Opera," Swift satirized it in "Gulliver's Travels," Defoe became by force of circumstances a moral teacher; Addison, Steele, all the essayists preached lay sermons; the novelists set out with the object, less to amuse than to instruct, to improve their readers. This tendency, so marked in the literature of the time, is the evidence of the reforming influences at work. But many years passed before their effect was perceptible.

There is nothing attractive about George the First and his two ugly old mistresses, the "Elephant" and the "Maypole"; nor about his court of Germans, utilizing their time in England by accumulating money to carry back to Hanover when the harvest time had passed. George the Second, brave, but narrow and ill-tempered, embodied in himself the coarseness of the time. He loved his wife, who was faithful to him through every outrage and every neglect. He caused one side to be taken out of her coffin, so that when he should be laid beside her his dust might mingle with hers. He esteemed her so highly, that in his grief at losing her, he went so far as to say that if she had not been his wife, he would have wished her for a mistress. To this wife, whom, in his own way, he sincerely loved and sincerely mourned, he confided all the details of his amours with other women. From Hanover, where he was acquiring Madame Walmoden as his mistress, "he acquainted the queen by letter of every step he took—of the growth of his passion, the progress of his applications, and their success, of every word as well as every action that passed—so minute a description of her person that, had the queen been a painter, she might have drawn her rival's picture at six hundred miles' distance. He added, too, the account of his buying her, and what he gave her, which, considering the rank of the purchaser, and the merits of the purchase as he set them forth, I think he had no great reason to brag of, when the first price, according to his report, was only one thousand ducats—a much greater proof of his economy than his passion."[118] Among many extraordinary relations and expressions his letters contained, "there was one in which he desired the queen to contrive, if she could, that the Prince of Modena, who was to come the latter end of the year to England, might bring his wife with him; and the reason he gave for it was, that he heard her Highness was pretty free of her person, and that he had the greatest inclination imaginable to pay his addresses to a daughter of the late Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans—'un plaisir' (for he always wrote in French), 'que je suis sur, ma chere Caroline, vous serez bien aise de me procurer, quand je vous dis combien je le souhaite.' Such a request to his wife respecting a woman he never saw, and during his connection with Madame Walmoden, speaks much stronger in a bare narrative of the fact, than by any comment or reflections; and is as incapable of being heightened as difficult to be credited."[119]

Queen Caroline bore all this without a murmur in order to retain her political influence with the king. To the power of the queen she sacrificed the feelings of the woman. With many good qualities and considerable ability, she shared in the prevailing coarseness. Her son, the Prince of Wales, was a very disagreeable person. Neither the queen nor the Princess Caroline "made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy—the queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the Princess Caroline declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe; and reproaching Lord Hervey" for ever having believed "the nauseous beast (those were her words) cared for anybody but his own nauseous self."[120] The morning after the prince had been ordered to leave the palace, "the queen, at breakfast, every now and then repeated, 'I hope, in God, I shall never see him again'; and the king, among many other paternal douceurs in his valediction to his son, said,'Thank-God, to-morrow night the puppy will be out of my house.'"[121] "My dear Lord" said the queen to Hervey, "I will give it to you under my own hand, if you are in any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it."[122] After the royal family, Sir Robert Walpole was the most prominent person in the country. He went about publicly with his mistress, and entertained his friends at his country-seat with orgies which disturbed the whole neighborhood. When the queen died he urged the princesses to get their father some new mistress to distract him. Lord Hervey says that Lady Sundon "had sense enough to perceive what black and dirty company, by living in a court, she was forced to keep."[123] Lady Deloraine, who was suspected of being the king's mistress, "when she spoke seriously to Sir Robert Walpole, pretended not to have yet yielded; and said 'she was not of an age like a vain or a loving fool, but that if she did consent, that she would be well paid.'"[124] "She told Lady Sundon, with whom she was very little acquainted, that the king had been very importunate these two years; and had often told her how unkind she was to refuse him; that it was mere crossness, for that he was sure her husband would not take it at all ill."[125] The looseness of the marriage tie had been a prevailing evil ever since the Restoration. Steele wrote in the Tatler in 1710: "The wits of this island for above fifty years past, instead of correcting the vices of the age, have done all they could to inflame them. Marriage has been one of the common topics of ridicule that every stage scribbler hath found his account in; for whenever there is an occasion for a clap, an impertinent jest upon matrimony is sure to raise it. This hath been attended with very pernicious consequences. Many a country squire, upon his setting up for a man of the town, has gone home in the gaiety of his heart and beat his wife. A kind husband hath been looked upon as a clown, and a good wife as a domestic annual unfit for the company or conversation of the beau monde. In short, separate beds, silent tables, and solitary homes have been introduced by your men of wit and pleasure of the age."[126]

The prevailing immorality and coarseness were in keeping with the absence of sympathy with all elevation of thought and sentiment. "If a man of any delicacy were to attend the discourses of the young fellows of this age," wrote Steele, "he would believe that there were none but prostitutes to make the objects of passion."[127] "Every woman is at heart a rake," thought Pope. Women were generally treated with disrespect, and distinctively female virtues were almost without appreciation. It is instructive to contrast the deeds of arms done in honor of a mistress in the Middle Ages, and the elevated sentiments held regarding women in what Addison called a "barbarous age," with the actions by which young men sometimes showed their devotion in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The latter were as extravagant as the former, but extravagant after how different a manner. One young fellow, distinguished himself by drinking wine strained through his mistress' chemise; another, by drinking out of her shoe; another, by having her slipper torn to shreds, cooked, and served up as a dish. Coarseness of thought naturally brought on coarseness of action. Horace Walpole wrote in 1737, "'Tis no little inducement, to make me wish myself in France, that I hear gallantry is not left off there; that you may be polite, and not be thought awkward for it. You know the pretty men of the age in England use the women with no more deference than they do their coach horses, and have not half the regard for them that they have for themselves."[128]

Against the grosser faults of immorality and indecency Steele and Addison preached. But even they were insensible to an elevated view of the relations between men and women. Such a view was, however, taken by Defoe; a man whom Steele and Addison, as well as the polite world in general, looked upon as an adventurer, and one whose opinions on social subjects they disdained. "We reproach the sex every day," wrote Defoe, "with folly and impertinence, while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves. * * * I cannot think that God ever made them so delicate, so glorious creatures, and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind, with souls capable of the same enjoyments as men, and all to be only stewards of our houses, cooks, and slaves."[129] Defoe stands almost alone in his remonstrance against the neglect of female education. But he stands more isolated still in his appreciation of womanly virtues, and in the enthusiasm with which he could speak of them. "A woman well-bred and well-taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behavior, is a creature without comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments; she is all softness and sweetness, love, wit, and delight; she is every way suitable to the sublimest wish; and the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her and be thankful."[130]

Love was hardly distinguished from mere animal desire. The poets wrote of it coldly and conventionally, as of a thing which existed only in name. The lover could only beg his mistress "to ease his pain." But the conventionality which extended through all thoughts and expressions relating to the higher emotions of the human soul, had no effect in diminishing the coarseness of thought and conversation. Men were conventional as regards the nobler sentiments of life, but they were not conventional in the spirit which excludes from conversation and literature the gross and the immoral. Chesterfield wrote to his son of honor, justice, and so forth, as qualities of which he should know the names, but of no consequence compared to "manners, good-breeding, and the graces." If a man blushed, it was not at his own indecency, nor at his own vice, but at the supposition that he could be so weak as to be influenced by sentiments of delicacy. Coarseness is, of course, quite separate from immorality, although the two are usually found together. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century there was a marked distinction between them. Swift's Stella, a woman of refinement, was highly indignant at remarks being made before her of a licentious character, but she herself used expressions of the grossest description without a thought of impropriety. The same distinction is seen in the essays and novels of the time. Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, all had a moral object in their fictions—the exposure and condemnation of vice, the encouragement of virtue. And yet most of these novels, especially intended to exert a good influence, are of so coarse a nature, and describe scenes so licentious that no parent would now allow them in their children's hands. The essayists wrote principally what we should now look upon as sermons, or moral teachings, and yet very many of their papers are unfit to be read in a mixed society. Men and women were made then of coarser stuff than we. Their eyes and ears were less sensitive. They were, at best, accustomed to think and speak of things which to us seem disgusting, and of which, therefore, we think and speak as little as possible. In view of the circumstances which influenced society in the last century, this condition was a perfectly natural one. We must bear it in mind in reading contemporary literature, that we may not mistake an author's intention. But we must be careful in censuring what was, after all, only one necessary stage in the development of our own civilization. It must be said, also, that the coarseness of the eighteenth century was a healthy coarseness, bred of energetic natures and animal spirits. In our time, and in the midst of our advanced refinement there lurks a sickly sentimentality, a false modesty, and an unhealthy delicacy which are in a degree inimical to morality. We have novels in great numbers, not broadly coarse, as those of Fielding or Smollett, but insidiously immoral, painting vice and unbridled passions in an attractive light.