HELPFUL BOOKS ON THE PERIOD

Seventeenth Century Studies, Edmund W. Gosse. (Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.)

The Jacobean Poets, Edmund W. Gosse. (John Murray.)

History of English Poetry, Vol. III, W. J. Courthope. (The Macmillan Company.)

Ben Jonson to Dryden, in the series entitled Ward's "English Poets." (The Macmillan Company.)

History of English Literature, H. A. Taine. (Chatto & Windus.)

The Age of Dryden, Richard Garnett. (George Bell & Sons.)

John Milton, M. Pattison in "English Men of Letters" Series. (The Macmillan Company.)

John Bunyan, J. A. Froude, in "English Men of Letters" Series. (The Macmillan Company.)

Old English Dramatists, James Russell Lowell. (Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.) Puritan and Anglican, Edward Dowden. (Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co.) From Shakespeare to Pope, Edmund Gosse.

(Dodd, Mead, & Co.)

CHAPTER V

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1700-1798

I. ITS GENERAL CHARACTER

ENGLISH literature of the eighteenth century began with the publication, in 1701, of Defoe's True-born Englishman. This century is one often maligned. But it is maligned only by the uninformed and unthinking; for it was, despite all its trivialities, a century of high and hard thinking. The renaissance and the reformation periods had advanced Europe to a cultural point far beyond anything attained previously, except in some forms of the art production of the thirteenth century and in some aspects of the philosophical thinking of the third century preceding the Christian era. The seventeenth century had seen considerable settling down and back from the results achieved by the two movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which had ended the middle ages and introduced modern times. But the eighteenth century rose to be one of deep and absorbed reflection. All the elements of civilization and culture were passed under review by the thinkers of Great Britain and even more deeply by those of Germany and France. The intellect of man was pondered over as it had not been since the days of Aristotle in ancient Greece. And not only man's intellect, but the universe in which man lives, was thought through with a penetrative power of vision, especially by such minds as that of Kant in Germany, such as had never before been applied to the nature and purposes of the universe.

The foundations of government, and all the aspects of its constitution and administration, were examined most seriously. The keenest attempts were also made to estimate the processes of literary production and the values of that which had been done in literature and other forms of art in the past.

It was an intellectual century, primarily. And all the activities of mind we have just been outlining were certain to bear fruit in life. They did bear fruit in life, both in that disciplined expression of life which we call literary work and in the less disciplined form of life which we term social relationships. Yet this century, while it produced great literature, produced little which can be ranked with the greatest, for it was nearly all brought forth too much under the "rule of thumb" of the intellect. And, moreover, the social life of the century, while in general it was one of progress, yet was much hampered by the strong struggles of old institutions to perpetuate their already doomed existence.

The century was, in Europe, largely one of reflection upon the past. But that reflection was sure to extend itself to what was contemporary, and when it did so, it precipitated a crisis in the French Revolution. The eighteenth century may be said, then, to be a transitional century, one fully taking up into itself the elements of the past and then transmuting them into the vitality of the future, a century actively preparatory for that which was to follow. The greatest product of that century was the civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It was, on the whole, a conservative age; but the result of its conservatism was such an intelligent conservation of that which was of value in the past that it brought about at its end great revolutions, such as the French Revolution, against the harmful and valueless elements of life which had survived

and crystallized out of the past. It was an epoch so full of understanding of what man had experienced that it forced men into the desire and necessity for experience that was relatively new. So much of all this ferment of intellectual life as came to be put into books is what concerns us here.

Classification of writers. The British authors of the eighteenth century may be grouped as poets, essayists, novelists, philosophers, and historians. We shall take them up for con

sideration in these groups.

The last years of the seventeenth century were the most barren of all times since the dreary stretches of the fifteenth. Hence it will be found easy to keep within the confines of the eighteenth century, in such consideration, so far as its beginning is concerned. But it is impossible to refrain from at least slight discussion of some of the poets of the nineteenth century when we have in hand those of the eighteenth, for several of the workers in the literature of the pre-Victorian or early decades of the nineteenth century were, in their work, well under way between 1790 and 1800.

I. THE POETS

Division. The poetry of the eighteenth century may be divided into three groups. In some instances the same authors will be mentioned in more than one group, for the principle of division upon which the grouping is here based, while seeming to be a time principle, is in reality one of the spirit of the poetry in the various divisions. The first group of poems was written between 1701 and 1738, beginning with Defoe's True-born Englishman. The chief poet was Pope. The second group was written between 1738 and 1785. Dr. Samuel Johnson's London marked the beginning of this group. The chief poet was Gray. The third group was written between

1785 and 1798. The first edition of the poems of Robert Burns opened this brief productive period. He was chief of the poets in this third period. A new literary century began in 1798 with the publication of a volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, written by Coleridge and Wordsworth, yet we include early labors of these two men within this third eighteenth-century group, for the sake of uniformity in dates.

The spirit of early eighteenth-century poetry. The eighteenth century is misunderstood by so many to-day because they are content to take its legacies without examination. The common thought about that age is that it was one of extreme and severe formalism, meaning by "formalism" living and doing all thinking and work by rule; that it was an age interested in being "correct," even at the expense of vitality. It is true that correctness was the dominant characteristic of the early decades of that century; but it was not the only characteristic. Underneath and up through all that classic severity and formalism there struggled the spirit of freedom of thought and freedom of expression. The spirit of the whole century in literature may be described as one of constant struggle between, on the one hand, repression of original individual thought and feeling, and, on the other hand, free, personal expressiveness of individual thought and feeling and of instinct for form that would best reveal individuality. This struggle was one in which the second of the two forces gradually triumphed. The three groups of poetry which we have mentioned are separated from each other on precisely this basis. During the first period classic formalism and restraint were uppermost in strength, the work of Alexander Pope being the standard of the time, though there were notable symptoms of revolt. During the second period this control by the ancients and by their chief repre