Читать книгу A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) - Saintsbury George - Страница 30

Her lips involuntary catch the chime

And half articulate the soothing rhyme;

Till weary thought no longer watch can keep,

But sinks reluctant in the folds of sleep—

of which it can only be said that any schoolboy could write it; his not infrequent depths from the couplet:—

Her airy guard prepares the softest down

From Peace's wing to line the nuptial crown.

where the image of a guardian angel holding Peace with the firmness of an Irish housewife, and plucking her steadily in order to line a nuptial crown (which must have been a sort of sun-bonnet) with the down thereof, will probably be admitted to be not easily surpassable. Of Hayley's companions in song, I have been dispensed by my predecessor from troubling myself with Erasmus Darwin, who was perhaps intellectually the ablest of them, though the extreme absurdity of the scheme of his Botanic Garden brought him, as the representative of the whole school, under the lash of the Anti-Jacobin in never-dying lines. Darwin's friend and townswoman, Anna Seward; Mrs. Barbauld, the author of the noble lines, "Life, we've been long together"—the nobility of which is rather in its sentiment than in its expression—and of much tame and unimportant stuff; Merry, who called himself Della Crusca and gathered round him the school of gosling imitators that drew on itself the lash of Gifford; the Laureate Pye; and others who, less fortunate than the victims of Canning and Frere, have suffered a second death in the forgetting of the very satires in which they met their deserts, can be barely named now. Two, however, may claim, if no great performance, a remarkable influence on great performers. Dr. Sayers, a member of the interesting Norwich school, directly affected Southey, and not Southey only, by his unrhymed verse; while the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles, now only to be read with a mild esteem by the friendliest critic most conscious of the historic allowance, roused Coleridge to the wildest enthusiasm and did much to form his poetic taste. To Bowles, and perhaps to one or two others, we may find occasion to return hereafter.

The satires, however, which have been more than once referred to in the preceding paragraph, form a most important feature, and a perhaps almost more important symptom, of the literary state of the time. They show, indeed, that its weakness did not escape the notice of contemporaries; but they also show that the very contemporaries who noticed it had nothing better to give in the way of poetry proper than that which they satirised. In fact, one of the chief of these satirists, Wolcot, has left a considerable mass of not definitely satirical work which is little if at all better than the productions of the authors he lampooned.

This very remarkable body of satirical verse, which extends from the Rolliad and the early satires of Peter Pindar at the extreme beginning of our present time to the Pursuits of Literature and the Anti-Jacobin towards its close, was partly literary and partly political, diverging indeed into other subjects, but keeping chiefly to these two and intermixing them rather inextricably. The Pursuits of Literature, though mainly devoted to the subject of its title, is also to a great extent political; the Rolliad and the Probationary Odes, intensely political, were also to no small extent literary. The chief examples were among the most popular literary productions of the time; and though few of them except the selected Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin are now read, almost all the major productions deserve reading. The great defect of contemporary satire—that it becomes by mere lapse of time unintelligible—is obviated to no small extent here by the crotchet (rather fortunate, though sometimes a little tedious) which these writers, almost without exception, had for elaborate annotation. Of the chief of them, already indicated more than once by reference or allusion, some account may be given.

The Rolliad is the name generally given for shortness to a collection of political satires originating in the great Westminster election of 1784, when Fox was the Whig candidate. It derived its name from a Devonshire squire, Mr. Rolle, who was a great supporter of Pitt; and, with the Political Eclogues, the mock Probationary Odes for the laureateship (vacant by Whitehead's death), and the Political Miscellanies, which closed the series, was directed against the young Prime Minister and his adherents by a knot of members of Brooks' Club, who are identified rather by tradition and assertion than by positive evidence. Sheridan, Tierney, Burgoyne, Lord John Townshend, Burke's brother Richard, and other public men probably or certainly contributed, as did Ellis—afterwards to figure so conspicuously in the same way on the other side. But the chief writers were a certain Dr. Lawrence, a great friend of Burke, who was in a way the editor; Tickel, a descendant of Addison's friend and a connection of the Sheridans; and another Irishman named Fitzpatrick. The various "skits" of which the book or series is composed show considerable literary skill, and there is a non-political and extraneous interest in the fact that it contains some rondeaux believed to be the only, or almost the only, examples of that form written in England between Cotton in the seventeenth century and the revival of it not very many years ago. The fun is often very good fun, and there is a lightness and brightness about the verse and phrasing which had been little seen in English since Prior. But the tone is purely personal; there are no principles at stake, and the book, besides being pretty coarse in tone, is a sort of object lesson in the merely intriguing style of politics which had become characteristic of England under the great seventy years' reign of the Whigs.

Coarseness and personality, however, are in the Rolliad refined and high-minded in comparison with the work of "Peter Pindar," which has the redeeming merit of being even funnier, with the defect of being much more voluminous and unequal. John Wolcot was a Devonshire man, born in May 1738 at Kingsbridge, or rather its suburb Dodbrooke, in Devonshire. He was educated as a physician, and after practising some time at home was taken by Sir William Trelawney to Jamaica. Here he took orders and received a benefice; but when he returned to England after Trelawney's death he practically unfrocked himself and resumed the cure of bodies. Although he had dabbled both in letters and in art, it was not till 1782 that he made any name; and he did it then by the rather unexpected way of writing poetical satires in the form of letters to the members of the infant Royal Academy. From this he glided into satire of the political kind, which, however, though he was a strong Whig and something more, did not so much devote itself to the attack or support of either of the great parties as to personal lampoons on the king, his family, and his friends. Neither Charles the Second at the hands of Marvell, nor George the Fourth at the hands of Moore, received anything like the steady fire of lampoon which Wolcot for years poured upon the most harmless and respectable of English monarchs. George the Third had indeed no vices—unless a certain parsimony may be dignified by that name—but he had many foibles of the kind that is more useful to the satirist than even vice. Wolcot's extreme coarseness, his triviality of subject, and a vulgarity of thought which is quite a different thing from either, are undeniable. But The Lousiad (a perfect triumph of cleverness expended on what the Greeks called rhyparography), the famous pieces on George and the Apple Dumplings and on the King's visit to Whitbread's Brewery, with scores of other things of the same kind (the best of all, perhaps, being the record of the Devonshire Progress), exhibit incredible felicity and fertility in the lower kinds of satire. This satire Wolcot could apply with remarkable width of range. His artistic satires (and it must be admitted that he had not bad taste here) have been noticed. He riddled the new devotion to physical science in the unlucky person of Sir Joseph Banks; the chief of his literary lampoons, a thing which is quite a masterpiece in its way, is his "Bozzy and Piozzi," wherein Boswell and Mrs. Thrale are made to string in am[oe]bean fashion the most absurd or the most laughable of their respective reminiscences of Johnson into verses which, for lightness and liveliness of burlesque representation, have hardly a superior. Until the severe legislation which followed the Jacobin terror in France cowed him, and to some extent even subsequently, Wolcot maintained a sort of Ishmaelite attitude, by turns attacking and defending himself against men of eminence in literature and politics, after a fashion the savagery whereof was excused sometimes by its courage and nearly always by an exuberant good-humour which both here and elsewhere accompanies very distinct ill-nature. His literary life in London covered about a quarter of a century, after which, losing his sight, he retired once more to the West, though he is said to have died at Somers Town in 1819. The best edition of his works is in five good-sized volumes, but it is known not to be complete.

Both the Rolliad men and Wolcot had been on the Whig, Wolcot almost on the Republican side; and for some years they had met with no sufficient adversaries, though Gifford soon engaged "Peter" on fairly equal terms. The great revulsion of feeling, however, which the acts of the French Revolution induced among Englishmen generally drew on a signal rally on the Tory part. The Anti-Jacobin newspaper, with Gifford as its editor, and Canning, Ellis (now a convert), and Frere as its chief contributors, not merely had at its back the national sentiment and the official power, but far outstripped in literary vigour and brilliancy the achievements of the other side. The famous collection above referred to, The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, which has been again and again reprinted, shows no signs of losing its attraction—a thing almost unparalleled in the case of satirical work nearly a century old. Its very familiarity makes it unnecessary to dwell much on it, but it is safe to say that nothing of the kind more brilliant has ever been written, or is very likely ever to be written, than the parodies of Southey's Sapphics and "Henry Martin" sonnet, the litany of the Jacobins, French and English, the "skits" on Payne Knight and Darwin, The Rovers—mocking the new German sentimentalism and mediævalism—and the stately satire of "The New Morality,"—where, almost alone, the writers become serious, and reach a height not attained since Dryden.

Gifford and Mathias differ from the others just mentioned in being less directly political in writing and inspiration, though Gifford at least was a strong politician. He was, like Wolcot, a Devonshire man, born at Ashburton in 1757, and, as his numerous enemies and victims took care often to remind him, of extremely humble birth and early breeding, having been a shoemaker's apprentice. Attracting attention as a clever boy, he was sent to Exeter College and soon attained to influential patronage. To do him justice, however, he made his reputation by the work of his own hand—his satires of The Baviad, 1794, and The Mæviad next year, attacking and pretty nearly extinguishing Merry and his Della Cruscans, a set of minor bards and mutual admirers who had infested the magazines and the libraries for some years.[1] The Anti-Jacobin and the editing of divers English classics put Gifford still higher; and when the Quarterly Review was established in opposition to the Edinburgh, his appointment (1809) to the editorship, which he held almost till his death (he gave it up in 1824 and died in 1826), completed his literary position. Gifford is little read nowadays, and a name which was not a very popular one even on his own side during his lifetime has, since the triumph of the politics and of some of the literary styles which he opposed, become almost a byword for savage and unfair criticism. The penalty of unfairness is usually and rightly paid in kind, and Gifford has paid it very amply. The struggles of his youth and lifelong ill-health no doubt aggravated a disposition at no time very sweet; and the feuds of the day, both literary and political, were apt to be waged, even by men far superior to Gifford in early and natural advantages, with the extremest asperity and without too much scruple. But Gifford is perhaps our capital example in English of a cast of mind which is popularly identified with that of the critic, though in truth nothing is more fatal to the attainment of the highest critical competence. It was apparently impossible for him (as it has been, and, it would seem, is for others,) to regard the author whom he was criticising, the editor who had preceded him in his labours, or the adversary with whom he was carrying on a polemic, as anything but a being partly idiotic and partly villainous, who must be soundly scolded, first for having done what he did, and secondly to prevent him from doing it again. So ingrained was this habit in Gifford that he could refrain from indulging it, neither in editing the essays of his most distinguished contributors, nor in commenting on the work of these contributors, outside the periodicals which he directed. Yet he was a really useful influence in more ways than one. The service that he did in forcibly suppressing the Della Cruscan nuisance is even yet admitted, and there has been plentiful occasion, not always taken, for similar literary dragonnades since. And his work as an editor of English classics was, blemishes of manner and temper excepted, in the main very good work.

Thomas James Mathias, the author of The Pursuits of Literature, was a much nearer approach to the pedant pure and simple. For he did not, like Gifford, redeem his rather indiscriminate attacks on contemporaries by a sincere and intelligent devotion to older work; and he was, much more than Gifford, ostentatious of such learning as he possessed. Accordingly the immense popularity of his only book of moment is a most remarkable sign of the times. De Quincey, who had seen its rise and its fall, declares that for a certain time, and not a very short one, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, The Pursuits of Literature was the most popular book of its own day, and as popular as any which had appeared since; and that there is not very much hyperbole in this is proved by its numerous editions, and by the constant references to it in the books of the time. Colman, who was one of Mathias' victims, declared that the verse was a "peg to hang the notes on"; and the habit above referred to certainly justified the gibe to no small extent. If the book is rather hard reading nowadays (and it is certainly rather difficult to recognise in it even the "demon of originality" which De Quincey himself grants rather grudgingly as an offset to its defects of taste and scholarship), it is perhaps chiefly obscured by the extreme desultoriness of the author's attacks and the absence of any consistent and persistent target. Much that Mathias reprehends in Godwin and Priestley, in Colman and Wolcot, and a whole crowd of lesser men, is justifiably censured; much that he lays down is sound and good enough. But the whole—which, after the wont of the time, consists of several pieces jointed on to each other and all flooded with notes—suffers from the twin vices of negation and divagation. Indeed, its chief value is that, both by its composition and its reception, it shows the general sense that literature was not in a healthy state, and that some renaissance, some reaction, was necessary.

The prominence of the French Revolution, which has already appeared more than once in the above account of late eighteenth century poetry, is still more strongly reflected in the prose writing of the period. Indeed, many of its principal writers devoted their chief attention either to describing, to attacking, or to defending the events and principles of this portentous phenomenon. The chief of them were John Moore, Arthur Young, Helen Maria Williams, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Holcroft. Of these Price, a veteran who had nearly reached his sixtieth year when our period commences, chiefly belongs to literature as an antagonist of Burke, as does Priestley, whose writing was very extensive, but who was as much more a "natural philosopher" than a man of letters as Price was much less a man of letters than a moralist and a statistician. Both, moreover, have been mentioned in the preceding volume, and it is not necessary to say much about them, or about John Horne Tooke (1736–1812), philologist and firebrand.

Of the others something may, and in some cases not a little must, appear. Dr. John Moore, sometimes called "Zeluco" Moore (from his most popular book), and father of the general who fell at Corunna, was born at Stirling in the winter of 1729–30. Studying medicine at Glasgow, he was apprenticed (as Smollett had been earlier) to Dr. John Gordon, and entered the army as surgeon's mate for the Laufeldt campaign. He then lived two years in Paris, perfecting himself in medicine, after which he established himself in Glasgow. After many years' practice there, he accompanied the young Duke of Hamilton on various travels through Europe, and in 1778 settled in London. This was his headquarters for the rest of his life, till his death at Richmond on 21st January 1803. The chief interruption to his residence there was his memorable journey with Lord Lauderdale to Paris in the latter half of 1792, which resulted in one of the most vivid and trustworthy accounts by an eyewitness of the opening scenes of the Terror. This Journal during a Residence in France was published during the next two years. But Moore had earlier than this, though not very early in his own life, become an author. His View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany, the result of his journeyings with the Duke, appeared in 1779, with a continuation relating to Italy two years later; and in 1786 he published his one famous novel Zeluco. After the Journal he returned to novel writing in Edward (1796) and Mordaunt (1800)—books by no means contemptible, but suffering from the want of a central interest and of a more universal grasp of character and manners. He contributed a Life of Smollett and an Essay on Romance to an edition of his friend's works in 1797. One or two medical books also stand to his credit, while he had rather unadvisedly added to his admirable Journal a View of the Causes of the French Revolution which is not worthy of it. His complete works fill seven volumes.

Of these, the earlier travels are readable enough, and sometimes very noteworthy in matter. It is almost enough to say that they contain some of the latest accounts by an Englishman of France while it was still merry, and of Venice while it was still independent; an early picture of Alpine travel; very interesting personal sketches of Voltaire and Frederick the Great; and one memorable passage (remembered and borrowed by Scott in Redgauntlet) telling how at Florence the shadow of Prince Charlie, passing the Duke of Hamilton in the public walks, fixed his eyes earnestly on the Duke, as though saying, "Our ancestors were better acquainted." Zeluco and the Journal alone deserve much attention from any one but a professed student of literature. The value of the latter has been admitted by all competent authorities, and it is enhanced by the fact that Moore was a strong Whig, and was even accused by some zealots of favouring Jacobinism. His picture, therefore, of the way in which political revolution glides into ethical anarchy is certainly unbiassed the other way. Of Zeluco everybody, without perhaps a very clear knowledge of its authorship, knows one passage—the extremely humorous letter containing the John Bull contempt of the sailor Dawson for the foolish nation which clothes its troops in "white, which is absurd, and blue, which is only fit for the artillery and the blue horse." But few know much more, though there is close by a much more elaborate and equally good piece of Smollettian fun in the quarrel of Buchanan and Targe, the Scotch Whig and Jacobite, over the reputation of Queen Mary. The book, however, besides the unlucky drawback that almost all its interest lies in the latter part, has for hero a sort of lifeless monster of wickedness, who is quite as uninteresting as a faultless one, and shows little veracity of character except in the minor personages and episodes. In these, and indeed throughout Moore's work, there is a curious mixture of convention with extreme shrewdness, of somewhat commonplace expression with a remarkably pregnant and humorous conception. But he lacks concentration and finish, and is therefore never likely to be much read again as a whole.

There may appear to be some slight inconsistency in giving a paragraph, if only a short one, to Arthur Young where distinct mention has been refused to Price and Priestley. But Olivier de Serres has secured a place in all histories of French literature as a representative of agricultural writing, and Young is our English Serres. Moreover, his Survey of France has permanent attraction for its picture of the state of that country just before, and in the earliest days of, the Revolution. And though his writing is extremely incorrect and unequal, though its literary effect is much injured by the insertion of statistical details which sometimes turn it for pages together into a mere set of tables, he has constant racy phrases, some of which have passed into the most honourable state of all—that of unidentified quotation—while more deserve it. He was born in 1741, the son of a Suffolk clergyman, was connected by marriage with the Burneys, and very early developed the passion for agricultural theory and practice which marked his whole life, even when in his later years (he lived till 1820) he fell under the influence of religious crotchets. His French travels were published in 1792–94, and form by far his most attractive book, though his surveys of England and Ireland contain much that is good. Young was a keen, though not a very consistent or clear-sighted politician, especially on the side of political economy. But, like other men of his time, he soon fell away from his first love for the French Revolution. In the literary, historical, and antiquarian associations of the places he visited, he seems to have felt no interest whatever.

Helen Maria Williams, with Young and Moore, is our chief English witness for the state of France and Paris just before and during the early years of the Revolution. She was one of Johnson's girl pets in his latest years, but Boswell is certainly justified in suggesting that if the sage had lived a little longer he would certainly not have repeated his elegant compliment: "If I am so ill when you are near, what should I be when you are away?" She outlived this phase also of her life, and did not die till 1828, being then sixty-five. Even in the early days she had been a Girondist, not a Jacobin; but she happened to live in Paris during the outbreak of the Revolution, wrote Letters from France, which had a great popularity, and was hand in glove with most of the English and Irish revolutionary leaders. Wolfe Tone in his diary speaks of her as "Miss Jane Bull completely," but neither prudery nor patriotism would have struck persons less prejudiced than the leader of the United Irishmen as the leading points of Helen Maria. Her poems, published in 1786, during her pre-revolutionary days, are dedicated to Queen Charlotte, and nearly half the first of the two pretty little volumes (which have a horrific frontispiece of the Princes in the Tower, by Maria Cosway) is occupied by a stately list of subscribers, with the Prince of Wales at their head. They have little merit, but are not uninteresting for their "signs of the times": sonnets, a tale called Edwin and Eltruda, an address to Sensibility, and so forth. But the longest, Peru, is in the full eighteenth century couplet with no sign of innovation. The Letters from France, which extend to eight volumes, possess, besides the interest of their subject, the advantage of a more than fair proficiency on the author's part in the formal but not ungraceful prose of her time, neither unduly Johnsonian nor in any way slipshod. But it may perhaps be conceded that, but for the interest of the subject, they would not be of much importance.

The most distinguished members of the Jacobin school, from the literary point of view, were Thomas Paine and William Godwin. Paine was only a literary man by accident. He was born at Thetford on 29th January 1737, in the rank of small tradesman, and subsequently became a custom-house officer. But he lost his place for debt and dubious conduct in 1774, and found a more congenial home in America, where he defended the rebellion of the Colonies in a pamphlet entitled Common Sense. His new compatriots rewarded him pretty handsomely, and after about a dozen years he returned to Europe, visiting England, which, however, he left again very shortly (it is said owing to the persuasion of Blake), just in time to escape arrest. He had already made friends in France, and his publication of The Rights of Man (1791–92), in answer to Burke's attack on the Revolution, made him enormously popular in that country. He was made a French citizen, and elected by the Pas de Calais to the Convention. His part here was not discreditable. He opposed the King's execution, and, being expelled the Convention and imprisoned by the Jacobins, wrote his other notorious work, The Age of Reason (1794–95), in which he maintained the Deist position against both Atheism and Christianity. He recovered his liberty and his seat, and was rather a favourite with Napoleon. In 1802 he went back to America, and died there (a confirmed drunkard it is said and denied) seven years later. A few years later still, Cobbett, in one of his sillier moods, brought Paine's bones back to England, which did not in the least want them.

The coarse and violent expression, as well as the unpopular matter, of Paine's works may have led to his being rather unfairly treated in the hot fights of the Revolutionary period; but the attempts which have recently been made to whitewash him are a mere mistake of reaction, or paradox, or pure stupidity. The charges which used to be brought against his moral character matter little; for neither side in these days had, or in any days has, a monopoly of loose or of holy living. But two facts will always remain: first, that Paine attacked subjects which all require calm, and some of them reverent, treatment, in a tone of the coarsest violence; and, secondly, that he engaged in questions of the widest reach, and requiring endless thought and reading, with the scanty equipments and the superabundant confidence of a self-educated man. No better instance of this latter characteristic could be produced or required than a sentence in the preface to the second part of the Age of Reason. Here Paine (who admitted that he had written the first part hastily, in expectation of imprisonment, without a library, and without so much as a copy of the Scriptures he was attacking at hand, and who further confessed that he knew neither Hebrew nor Greek nor even Latin) observes: "I have produced a work that no Bible-believer, though writing at his ease and with a library of Church books about him, can refute." In this charming self-satisfaction, which only natural temper assisted by sufficient ignorance can attain in perfection, Paine strongly resembles his disciple Cobbett. But the two were also alike in the effect which this undoubting dogmatism, joined to a very clear, simple, and forcible style, less correct in Paine's case than in Cobbett's, produced upon readers even more ignorant than themselves, and greatly their inferiors in mental strength and literary skill. Paine, indeed, was as much superior to Cobbett in logical faculty as he was his inferior in range of attainments and charm of style; while his ignorance and his arbitrary assumption and exclusion of premises passed unnoticed by the classes whom he more particularly addressed. He was thus among the lower and lower middle classes by far the most formidable propagator of anarchist ideas in religion and politics that England produced; and his influence lasted till far into the present century, being, it is said, only superseded by new forms of a similar spirit. But he never could have had much on persons of education, unless they were prepared to sympathise with him, or were of singularly weak mind.

William Godwin, on the other hand, affected the "educated persons," and those of more or less intellectual power, even more forcibly than Paine affected the vulgar. This influence of his, indeed, is a thing almost unique, and it has perhaps never yet been succinctly examined and appraised. Born at Wisbech in 1756, the son of a dissenting minister, he himself was thoroughly educated for the Presbyterian ministry, and for some five years discharged its functions. Then in 1783 (again the critical period) he became unorthodox in theology, and took to literature, addicting himself to Whig politics. He also did a certain amount of tutoring. It was not, however, till nearly ten years after he had first taken to writing that he made his mark, and attained the influence above referred to by a series of works rather remarkably different in character. 1793 saw the famous Inquiry concerning Political Justice, which for a time carried away many of the best and brightest of the youth of England. Next year came the equally famous and more long-lived novel of Caleb Williams, and an extensive criticism (now much forgotten, but at the time of almost equal importance with these), published in the Morning Chronicle, of the charge of Lord Chief-Justice Eyre in the trial of Horne Tooke, Holcroft, and others for high treason. Godwin himself ran some risk of prosecution; and that he was left unmolested shows that the Pitt government did not strain its powers, as is sometimes alleged. In 1797 he published The Enquirer, a collection of essays on many different subjects; and in 1799 his second remarkable novel (it should be said that in his early years of struggle he had written others which are quite forgotten) St. Leon. The closing years of the period also saw first his connection and then his marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft, who will be noticed immediately after him.

It is rather curious that Godwin, who was but forty-four at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and continued to be a diligent writer as well as a publisher and bookseller till his death in 1836, his last years being made comfortable by a place under the Reform Ministry, never did anything really good after the eighteenth century had closed. His tragedy Antonio only deserves remembrance because of Lamb's exquisite account of its damnation. His Life of Chaucer (1801) was one of the earliest examples of that style of padding and guesswork in literary biography with which literature has been flooded since. His later novels—Fleetwood, Mandeville, Cloudesley, etc.—are far inferior to Caleb Williams (1794) and St. Leon (1799). His Treatise of Population (1820), in answer to Malthus, was belated and ineffective; and his History of the Commonwealth, in four volumes, though a very respectable compilation, is nothing more. Godwin's character was peculiar, and cannot be said to be pleasing. Though regarded (or at least described) by his enemies as an apostle of license, he seems to have been a rather cold-blooded person, whose one passion for Mary Wollstonecraft was at least as much an affair of the head as of the heart. He was decidedly vain, and as decidedly priggish; but the worst thing about him was his tendency to "sponge"—a tendency which he indulged not merely on his generous son-in-law Shelley, but on almost everybody with whom he came in contact. It is, however, fair to admit that this tendency (which was probably a legacy of the patronage system) was very wide-spread at the time; that the mighty genius of Coleridge succumbed to it to a worse extent even than Godwin did; and that Southey himself, who for general uprightness and independence has no superior in literary history, was content for years to live upon the liberality not merely of an uncle, but of a school comrade, in a way which in our own days would probably make men of not half his moral worth seriously uncomfortable.

Estimates of the strictly formal excellence of Godwin's writing have differed rather remarkably. To take two only, his most recent biographer, Mr. Kegan Paul, is never weary of praising the "beauty" of Godwin's style; while Scott, a very competent and certainly not a very savage critic, speaks of the style of the Chaucer as "uncommonly depraved, exhibiting the opposite defects of meanness and of bombast." This last is too severe; but I am unable often to see the great beauty, the charm, and so forth, which Godwin's admirers have found in his writings. He shows perhaps at his best in this respect in St. Leon, where there are some passages of a rather artificial, but solemn and grandiose beauty; and he can seldom be refused the praise of a capable and easily wielded fashion of writing, equally adapted to exposition, description, and argument. But that Godwin's taste and style were by no means impeccable is proved by his elaborate essay on the subject in the Enquirer, where he endeavours to show that the progress of English prose-writing had been one of unbroken improvement since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and pours contempt on passages of Shakespeare and others where more catholic appreciation could not fail to see the beauty. In practice his special characteristic, which Scott (or Jeffrey, for the criticism appeared in the Edinburgh) selected for special reprobation in the context of the passage quoted above, was the accumulation of short sentences, very much in the manner of which, in the two generations since his death, Macaulay and the late Mr. J. R. Green, have been the chief exponents. Hazlitt probably learnt this from Godwin; and I think there is no doubt that Macaulay learnt it from Hazlitt.

It may, however, be freely admitted that whatever Godwin had to say was at least likely not to be prejudicially affected by the manner in which he said it. And he had, as we have seen, a great deal to say in a great many kinds. The "New Philosophy," as it was called, of the Political Justice was to a great extent softened, if not positively retracted, in subsequent editions and publications; but its quality as first set forth accounts both for the conquest which it, temporarily at least, obtained over such minds as those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and for the horror with which it was regarded elsewhere. Godwin's system was not too consistent, and many of its parts were borrowed more or less directly from others: from Locke, from Hume, from the French materialists, from Jonathan Edwards, and, by way of reaction as well as imitation, from Rousseau. But Godwin's distinctive claim, if not exactly glory, is that he was the first systematic Anarchist. His cardinal principle was that government in itself, and with all its consequences of law, restriction, punishment, etc., is bad, and to be got rid of. He combined this (logically enough) with perfectibilism—supposing the individual to be infinitely susceptible of "melioration" by the right use of reason—and (rather illogically) with necessarianism. In carrying out his views he not only did not hesitate at condemning religion, marriage, and all other restrictions of the kind, but indulged in many curious crotchets as to the uselessness, if not mischievousness, of gratitude and other sentiments generally considered virtuous. The indefinite development of the individual by reason and liberty, and the general welfare of the community at large, were the only standards that he admitted. And it should be said, to his credit, that he condemned the use of violence and physical force against government quite as strongly as their use by government. The establishment of absolute liberty, in the confidence that it will lead to absolute happiness, was, at first at any rate, the main idea of the Political Justice, and it is easy to understand what wild work it must have made with heads already heated by the thunder-weather of change that was pervading Europe.

Godwin has been frequently charged with alarm at the anarchist phantom he had raised. It is certain not merely that he altered and softened the Political Justice not a little, but that in his next work of the same kind, The Enquirer, he took both a very different line of investigation and a different tone of handling. In the preface he represents it as a sort of inductive complement to the high a priori scheme of his former work; but this is not a sufficient account of the matter. It is true that his paradoxical rebellion against conventions appears here and there; and his literary criticism, which was never strong, may be typified by his contrast of the "hide-bound sportiveness" of Fielding with the "flowing and graceful hilarity" of Sterne. Indeed, this sentence takes Godwin's measure pretty finally, and shows that he was of his age, not for all time. But, on the other hand, it is fair to say that the essays on "The Study of the Classics" and the "Choice of Reading," dealing with subjects on which, both then and since, oceans of cant and nonsense have been poured forth, are nearly as sound as they can be.

In his purely imaginative work he presents a contrast not much less strange. We may confine attention here to the two capital examples of it. Caleb Williams alone has survived as a book of popular reading, and it is no small tribute to its power that, a full century after its publication, it is still kept on sale in sixpenny editions. Yet on no novel perhaps is it so difficult to adjust critical judgment, either by the historical or the personal methods. Both its general theme—the discovery of a crime committed by a man of high reputation and unusual moral worth, and the persecution of the discoverer by the criminal—and its details, are thoroughly leavened and coloured by Godwin's political and social views at the time; and either this or some other defect has made it readable with great difficulty at all times by some persons, among whom I am bound to enrol myself. Yet the ingenuity of its construction, in spite of the most glaring impossibilities, the striking situations it contains, and no doubt other merits, have always secured readers for it. St. Leon, a romance of the elixir vitæ, has no corresponding central interest, and, save in the amiable but very conventional figure of the heroine Marguerite, who is said to have been studied from Mary Wollstonecraft, no interest of character; while its defects of local colour and historical truth are glaring. But Godwin, who was in so many ways a mirror of the new thought of the time, had caught by anticipation something of its nascent spirit of romance. He is altogether a rather puzzling person; and perhaps the truest explanation of the puzzle, as well as certainly the most comfortable to the critic, is that his genius and literary temperament were emphatically crude and undeveloped, that he was a prophet rather than anything else, and that he had the incoherencies and the inconsistencies almost inseparable from prophecy.

Even if fate and metaphysical aid had not conjoined Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in the closest bond possible between man and woman, it would have been proper to mention their names together as authors. For as Godwin's "New Philosophy" was the boldest attempt made by any man of the time in print to overthrow received conventions of the relations of man to man, and incidentally of man to woman, so was his wife's Vindication of the Rights of Woman a complement of it in relation to the status of the other sex as such. She was rather hardly treated in her own time; Horace Walpole calling her, it is said (I have not verified the quotation), a "hyena in petticoats": it would be at least as just to call Lord Orford a baboon in breeches. And though of late years she has been made something of a heroine, it is to be feared that admiration has been directed rather to her crotchets than to her character. This last appears to have been as lovable as her hap was ill. The daughter of an Irishman of means, who squandered them and became a burden on his children; the sister of an attorney who was selfishly indifferent to his sisters—she had to fend for herself almost entirely. At one time she and her sisters kept school; then she was, thanks to the recommendation of Mr. Prior, a master at Eton, introduced as governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough; then, after doing hack-work for Johnson, the chief Liberal publisher of the period, she went to Paris, and unluckily fell in with a handsome scoundrel, Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier. She lived with him, he deserted her, and she nearly committed the suicide which was actually the fate of her unfortunate daughter by him, Fanny Imlay or Godwin. Only at the last had she a glimpse of happiness. Godwin, who had some weaknesses, but who was not a scoundrel, met her, and fell in love with her, and as both had independently demonstrated that marriage was a failure, they naturally married; but she died a week after giving birth to a daughter—the future Mrs. Shelley. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, on which Mary Wollstonecraft's fame as an author almost wholly rests, is in some ways a book nearly as faulty as it can be. It is not well written; it is full of prejudices quite as wrong-headed as those it combats; it shows very little knowledge either of human nature or of good society; and its "niceness," to use the word in what was then its proper sense, often goes near to the nasty. But its protest on the one hand against the "proper" sentimentality of such English guides of female youth as Drs. Fordyce and Gregory, on the other against the "improper" sentimentality of Rousseau, is genuine and generous. Many of its positions and contentions may be accepted unhesitatingly to-day by those who are by no means enamoured of advanced womanhood; and Mary, as contrasted with most of her rights-of-women followers, is curiously free from bumptiousness and the general qualities of the virago. She had but ill luck in life, and perhaps showed no very good judgment in letters, but she had neither bad brains nor bad blood; and the references to her, long after her death, by such men as Southey, show the charm which she exercised.

With Godwin also is very commonly connected Thomas Holcroft (or, as Lamb always preferred to spell the name, "Ouldcraft"), a curiosity of literature and a rather typical figure of the time. Holcroft was born in London in December 1745, quite in the lowest ranks, and himself rose from being stable-boy at Newmarket, through the generally democratic trade of shoemaking, to quasi-literary positions as schoolmaster and clerk, and then to the dignity of actor. He was about thirty-five when he first began regular authorship; and during the rest of his life he wrote four novels, some score and a half of plays, and divers other works, none of which is so good as his Autobiography, published after his death by Hazlitt, and said to be in part that writer's work. It would have been fortunate for Holcroft if he had confined himself to literature; for some of his plays, notably The Road to Ruin, brought him in positively large sums of money, and his novels were fairly popular. But he was a violent democrat—some indeed attributed to him the origination of most of the startling things in Godwin's Political Justice—and in 1794 he was tried, though with no result, for high treason, with Horne Tooke and others. This brought him into the society of the young Jacobin school—Coleridge, and the rest—but was disastrous to the success of his plays; and when he went abroad in 1799 he entered on an extraordinary business of buying old masters (which were rubbish) and sending them to England, where they generally sold for nothing. He returned, however, and died on 23rd March 1809.

Holcroft's theatre will best receive such notice as it requires in connection with the other drama of the century. Of his novels, Alwyn, the first, had to do with his experiences as an actor, and Hugh Trevor is also supposed to have been more or less autobiographical. Holcroft's chief novel, however, is Anna St. Ives, a book in no less than seven volumes, though not very large ones, which was published in 1792, and which exhibits no small affinities to Godwin's Caleb Williams, and indeed to the Political Justice itself. And Godwin, who was not above acknowledging mental obligations, if he was rather ill at discharging pecuniary ones, admits the influence which Holcroft had upon him. Anna St. Ives, which, like so many of the other novels of its day, is in letters, is worth reading by those who can spare the time. But it cannot compare, for mere amusement, with the very remarkable Memoir above referred to. Only about a fourth of this is said to be in Holcroft's own words; but Hazlitt has made excellent matter of the rest, and it includes a good deal of diary and other authentic work. In his own part Holcroft shows himself a master of the vernacular, as well as (what he undoubtedly was) a man of singular shrewdness and strength of mental temper.

The Novel school of the period (to which Holcroft introduces us) is full and decidedly interesting, though it contains at the best one masterpiece, Vathek, and a large number of more or less meritorious attempts in false styles. The kind was very largely written—much more so than is generally thought. Thus Godwin, in his early struggling days, and long before the complete success of Caleb Williams, wrote, as has been mentioned, for trifling sums of money (five and ten guineas), two or three novels which even the zeal of his enthusiastic biographer does not seem to have been able to recover. Nor did the circulating library, even then a flourishing institution, lack hands more or less eminent to work for it, or customers to take off its products. The Minerva Press, much cited but little read, had its origin in this our time; and this time is entitled to the sole and single credit of starting and carrying far a bastard growth of fiction, the "tale of terror," which continued to be cultivated in its simplest form for at least half a century, and which can hardly be said to be quite obsolete yet. But as usual we must proceed by special names, and there is certainly no lack of them. "Zeluco" Moore has been dealt with already; Day, the eccentric author of Sanford and Merton, belongs mainly to an earlier period, and died, still a young man, in the year of the French Revolution; but, besides, Holcroft, Beckford, Bage, Cumberland, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis, with Mrs. Inchbald, are distinctly "illustrations" of the time, and must have more or less separate mention.

William Beckford is one of the problems of English literature. He was one of the richest men in England, and his long life—1760 to 1844—was occupied for the most part not merely with the collection, but with the reading of books. That he could write as well as read he showed as a mere boy by his satirical Memoirs of Painters, and by the great-in-little novel of Vathek (1783), respecting the composition of which in French or English divers fables are told. Then he published nothing for forty years, till in 1834 and 1835 he issued his Travels in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, recollections of his earliest youth. These travels have extraordinary merits of their kind; but Vathek is a kind almost to itself. The history of the Caliph, in so far as it is a satire on unlimited power, is an eighteenth century commonplace; while many traits in it are obviously imitated from Voltaire. But the figure of Nouronihar, which Byron perhaps would have equalled if he could, stands alone in literature as a fantastic projection of the potentiality of evil magnificence in feminine character; and the closing scenes in the domain of Eblis have the grandeur of Blake combined with that finish which Blake's temperament, joined to his ignorance of literature and his lack of scholarship, made it impossible for him to give. The book is quite unique. It could hardly, in some of its weaker parts especially, have been written at any other time; and yet its greater characteristics have nothing to do with that time. In the florid kind of supernatural story it has no equal. Only Dante, Beckford, and Scott in Wandering Willie's Tale have given us Hells that are worthy of the idea of Hell.

Except that both were very much of their time, it would be impossible to imagine a more complete contrast than that which exists between Beckford and Bage. The former was, as has been said, one of the richest men in England, the creator of two "Paradises" at Fonthill and Cintra, the absolute arbiter of his time and his pleasures, a Member of Parliament while he chose to be so, a student, fierce and recluse, the husband of a daughter of the Gordons, and the father of a mother of the Hamiltons, the collector, disperser, bequeather of libraries almost unequalled in magnificence and choice. Robert Bage, who was born in 1728 and died in 1801, was in some ways a typical middle-class Englishman. He was a papermaker, and the son of a papermaker; he was never exactly affluent nor exactly needy; he was apparently a Quaker by education and a freethinker by choice; and between 1781 and 1796, obliged by this reason or that to stain the paper which he made, he produced six novels: Mount Henneth, Barham Downs, The Fair Syrian, James Wallace, Man as he is, and Hermsprong. The first, second, and fourth of these were admitted by Scott to the "Ballantyne Novels," the others, though Hermsprong is admittedly Bage's best work, were not. It is impossible to say that there is genius in Bage; yet he is a very remarkable writer, and there is noticeable in him that singular fin de siècle tendency which has reasserted itself a century later. An imitator of Fielding and Smollett in general plan—of the latter specially in the dangerous scheme of narrative by letter—Bage added to their methods the purpose of advocating a looser scheme of morals and a more anarchical system of government. In other words, Bage, though a man well advanced in years at the date of the Revolution, exhibits for us distinctly the spirit which brought the Revolution about. He is a companion of Godwin and of Mary Wollstonecraft; and though it must be admitted that, as in other cases, the presence of "impropriety" in him by no means implies the absence of dulness, he is full of a queer sort of undeveloped and irregular cleverness.

The most famous, though not the only novel of Richard Cumberland; Henry, shows the same tendency to break loose from British decorum, even such decorum as had really been in the main observed by the much-abused pens of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne himself; but it has little purpose and indeed little vigour of any kind. Cumberland clung as close as he could to the method of Fielding, including the preliminary dissertation or meditation, but he would be a very strange reader who should mistake the two.

The school of Bage and Cumberland, the former of whom bears some little resemblance to his countrywoman George Eliot, was, with or without Bage's purpose, continued more or less steadily; indeed, it may be said to be little more than a variant, with local colour, of the ordinary school of novel-writing. But it was not this school which was to give tone to the period. The "tale of terror" had been started by Horace Walpole in the Castle of Otranto, and had, as we have seen, received a new and brilliant illustration in the hands of Beckford. But the genius of the author of Vathek could not be followed; the talent of the author of the Castle of Otranto was more easily imitated. How far the practice of the Germans (who had themselves imitated Walpole, and whose work began in the two last decades of the century to have a great reflex influence upon England) was responsible for the style of story which, after Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis had set the fashion, dominated the circulating libraries for years, is a question not easy and perhaps not necessary to answer positively. I believe myself that no foreign influence ever causes a change in national taste; it merely coincides therewith. But the fact of the set in the tide is unmistakable and undeniable. For some years the two authors just mentioned rode paramount in the affections of English novel readers; before long Miss Austen devoted her early and delightful effort, Northanger Abbey, to satirising the taste for them, and quoted or invented a well-known list of blood-curdling titles;[2] the morbid talent of Maturin gave a fresh impulse to it, even after the healthier genius of Scott had already revolutionised the general scheme of novel-writing; and yet later still an industrious literary hack, Leitch Ritchie, was able to issue, and it may be presumed to find readers for, a variety of romance the titles of which might strike a hasty practitioner of the kind of censure usual in biblical criticism as a designed parody of Miss Austen's own catalogue. The style, indeed, in the wide sense has never lost favour. But in the special Radcliffian form it reigned for some thirty years, and was widely popular for nearly fifty.

Anne Radcliffe, whose maiden name was Ward, was born on 9th July 1764 and died on 7th February 1822. One of her novels, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously; but otherwise her whole literary production took place between the years 1789 and 1797. The first of these years saw The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, a very immature work; the last The Italian, which is perhaps the best. Between them appeared A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and the far-famed Mysteries of Udolpho in 1795. Matthew Gregory Lewis, who, like Beckford, was a West-Indian landowner and member for Hindon, and was well-to-do if not extremely wealthy, was nine years younger than Mrs. Radcliffe, and did not produce his famous Monk till the same year which saw Udolpho. He published a good deal of other work in prose, verse, and drama; the most noteworthy of the second class being Tales of Terror, to which Scott contributed, and the most noteworthy of the third The Castle Spectre. Lewis, who, despite some foibles, was decidedly popular in the literary and fashionable society of his time, died in 1818 at the age of forty-five on his way home from the West Indies. Although he would have us understand that The Monk was written some time before its actual publication, Lewis' position as a direct imitator of Mrs. Radcliffe is unmistakable; and although he added to the characteristics of her novels a certain appeal to "Lubricity" from which she was completely free, the general scheme of the two writers, as well as that of all their school, varies hardly at all. The supernatural in Mrs. Radcliffe's case is mainly, if not wholly, what has been called "the explained supernatural,"—that is to say, the apparently ghostly, and certainly ghastly, effects are usually if not always traced to natural causes, while in most if not all of her followers the demand for more highly spiced fare in the reader, and perhaps a defect of ingenuity in the writer, leaves the devils and witches as they were. In all, without exception, castles with secret passages, trap-doors, forests, banditti, abductions, sliding panels, and other apparatus and paraphernalia of the kind play the main part. The actual literary value is, on the whole, low; though Mrs. Radcliffe is not without glimmerings, and it is exceedingly curious to note that, just before the historical novel was once for all started by Scott, there is in all these writers an absolute and utter want of comprehension of historical propriety, of local and temporal colour, and of all the marks which were so soon to distinguish fiction. Yet at the very same time the yearning after the historical is shown in the most unmistakable fashion from Godwin down to the Misses Lee, Harriet and Sophia (the latter of whom in 1783 produced, in The Recess, a preposterous Elizabethan story, which would have liked to be a historical novel), and other known and unknown writers.

Another lady deserves somewhat longer notice. Hannah More, once a substantially famous person in literature, is now chiefly remembered by her association with great men of letters, such as Johnson in her youth, Macaulay and De Quincey in her old age. She was born as early as 1745 near Bristol, and all her life was a Somerset worthy. She began—a curious beginning for so serious a lady, but with reforming intentions—to write for the stage, published The Search after Happiness when she was seventeen, and had two rather dreary tragedies, Percy and the Fatal Secret, acted, Garrick being a family friend of hers. Becoming, as her day said, "pious," she wrote "Sacred Dramas," and at Cowslip Green, Barley Wood, and Clifton produced "Moral Essays," the once famous novel of C[oe]lebs in Search of a Wife, and many tracts, the best known of which is The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. She died at a great age on 7th September 1833. Hannah More is not to be spoken of with contempt, except by ignorance or incompetence. She had real abilities, and was a woman of the world. But she was very unfortunately parted in respect of time, coming just before the days when it became possible for a lady to be decent in literature without being dull.

If a book and not a chapter were allowed about this curious, and on the whole rather neglected and undervalued, Fifth Act of the eighteenth century, many of its minor literary phenomena would have to be noticed: such as the last state of periodicals before the uprising of the Edinburgh Review, and the local literary coteries, the most notable of which was that of Norwich, with the Aldersons, Sayers the poet, who taught Southey and others to try blank verse in other measures than the decasyllabic, William Taylor, the apostle of German literature in England, and others. But, as it is, we must concentrate our attention on its main lines.

In these lines the poetical pioneers, the political and other satirists, the revolutionary propagandists, and the novelists of terror, are the four classes of writers that distinguish the period 1780 to 1800; and perhaps they distinguish it sufficiently, at least for those with whom historical genesis and connection atone to some extent for want of the first order of intrinsic interest. In less characteristic classes and in isolated literary personalities the time was not extremely rich, though it was not quite barren. We can here only notice cursorily the theological controversialists who, like Paley, Horsley, and Watson, waged war against the fresh outburst of aggressive Deism coinciding with the French Revolution: the scholars, such as, in their different ways, Dr. Parr, the Whig "moon" of Dr. Johnson; Porson, the famous Cambridge Grecian, drinker, and democrat; Taylor the Platonist, a strange person who translated most of the works of Plato and was said to have carried his discipleship to the extent of a positive Paganism; Gilbert Wakefield, a miscellaneous writer who wrote rapidly and with little judgment, but with some scholarship and even some touches of genius, on a great variety of subjects; Jacob Bryant, mythologist, theologian, and historical critic, a man of vast learning but rather weak critical power; and many others. Of some of these we may indeed have more to say later, as also of the much-abused Malthus, whose famous book, in part one of the consequences of Godwin, appeared in 1798; while as for drama, we shall return to that too. Sheridan survived through the whole of the time and a good deal beyond it; but his best work was done, and the chief dramatists of the actual day were Colman, Holcroft, Cumberland, and the farce-writer O'Keefe, a man of humour and a lively fancy.

One, however, of these minor writers has too much of what has been called "the interest of origins" not to have a paragraph to himself. William Gilpin, who prided himself on his connection with Bernard Gilpin, the so-called "Apostle of the North" in the sixteenth century, was born at Carlisle. But he is best known in connection with the New Forest, where, after taking his degree at Oxford, receiving orders, and keeping a school for some time, he was appointed to the living of Boldre. This he held till his death in 1814. Gilpin was not a secularly-minded parson by any means; but his literary fame is derived from the series of Picturesque Tours (The Highlands, 1778; The Wye and South Wales, 1782; The Lakes, 1789; Forest Scenery, 1791; and The West of England and the Isle of Wight, 1798) which he published in the last quarter of the century. They were extremely popular, they set a fashion which may be said never to have died out since, and they attained the seal of parody in the famous Dr. Syntax of William Combe (1741–1823), an Eton and Oxford man who spent a fortune and then wrote an enormous amount of the most widely various work in verse and prose, of which little but Syntax itself (1812 sqq.) is remembered. Gilpin himself is interesting as an important member of "the naturals," as they have been oddly and equivocally called. His style is much more florid and less just than Gilbert White's, and his observation correspondingly less true. But he had a keen sense of natural beauty and did much to instill it into others.

In all the work of the time, however, great and small, from the half-unconscious inspiration of Burns and Blake to the common journey-work of book-making, we shall find the same character—incessantly recurring, and unmistakable afterwards if not always recognisable at the time—of transition, of decay and seed-time mingled with and crossing each other. There are no distinct spontaneous literary schools: the forms which literature takes are either occasional and dependent upon outward events, such as the wide and varied attack and defence consequent upon the French Revolution, or else fantastic, trivial, reflex. Sometimes the absence of any distinct and creative impulse reveals itself in work really good and useful, such as the editing of old writers, of which the labours of Malone are the chief example and the forgeries of Ireland the corresponding corruption; or the return to their study æsthetically, in which Headley, a now forgotten critic, did good work. Sometimes it resulted in such things as the literary reputation (which was an actual thing after a kind) of persons like Sir James Bland Burges, Under-Secretary of State, poetaster, connoisseur, and general fribble. Yet all the while, in schools and universities, in London garrets and country villages, there was growing up, and sometimes showing itself pretty unmistakably, the generation which was to substitute for this trying and trifling the greatest work in verse, and not the least in prose, that had been done for two hundred years. The Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the clarion-call of the new poetry, so clearly sounded, so inattentively heard, might have told all, and did tell some, what this generation was about to do.