The Eighteenth Century
An Age of Prose and Reason /247
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY-AN AGE OF PROSE yHis AND REASON
Q. 39. Write an essay on the eighteenth century as an Age of Prose and Reason. (Rohilkhand 1984)
Or
Q. In what sense was the eighteenth century pre-eminently an age of prose and reaons? (Puravanchal 1992)
Or
Q. Discuss the eighteenth century as ”an age of prose and reason.” (Rohilkhand 1981, Garhwal 1990)
Or
Q. Discuss the aptness of the eigteenth century being described as the Age of Reason.
(Agra 1990, Gorakhpur 1986) Or
Q. In what sense was the eighteenth century pre-eminently an age of prose and reason? (Agra 1963, Garhwal 1989)
Or
Q. (The Age of prose and reason-our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century.’Justify thisremark.
(Agra 1957,1990)
Introduction :-
The eighteenth century, says Legouis in.4 Short History of English
Literature, ”viewed as a whole has a distinctive character.” It was ”the
classical age” in English literature, and, as such, held and practised
some basic principles concerning life and literature, Even then one
should avoid sweeping generalizations. The temptation to gencralize-
-the eighteenth century particularly-is hard to overcome. ”Few cen-
:uries,” says George Sherburn in A Literary History of England edited
y Albert C Baugh, ”have with more facility been reduced to a formula
han the eighteenth…Few centuries, to be sure, have demonstrated
norc unity of character than superficially considered the eighteenth
eems to have possessed.” However, it is fallacious to believe that there
a dear cleavage between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth.
Nerves Sherburn: The ideas of the later seventeenth century con
we into the eighteenth.” At any rate, in the eighteenth century there
’3s the completion of tin? reaction »g’nfff Elizabethan romantKTf
U reaction had started in the seventeenth century with Denham,
», and Drydea. Pope and his contemporaries stood on the other
tf
3J
248 / A History of English Literature
extreme to Elizabethan romanticists and ushered in ”the age of prose and reason,” as Matthew Arnold characterises the eighteenth century. Now, let us seen how and how far the eighteenth century was ”an age of prose and reason.” Dominance of Reason :-
Pope and his followers give much importance to reason in their modes of thinking and expressing. Reason may variously manifest itself as good sense, rationalism, intellect, wit or just dry logicism, but it is definitely against all excessive emotionalism, sentimentalise!, extravagance, eccentricity, lack of realism, escapism, and even imagination. It is easy to see that in the eighteenth century reason was exalted to a shibboleth. Cazamian maintains: ”The true source and the realquality of English classicism are of a psychological nature. Its ideal, its characteristics, its method, all resolve themselves into a general searching after rationality.” This search which started in the age of Dryden culminated in the age of Pope. Cazamian maintains in this connexion: ”One may say that the age of Pope lives more fully, more spontaneously, at the pitch of that dominant intellectuality, which during the preceding age was chiefly an irresistible impulse, a kind of contagious intoxication.” This reign of reason and common sense continued into the middle of the century when new ideas and voices appeared, and the precursors of the English romantics of the nineteenth century appeared on the scene. All the important writers of the age-Swift, Pope, and Dr. Johnson-glorified reason both in their literary and critical work and, conversely, made unreason and bad sense the recurring targets of their satire. Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, for example, chastises Yahoos for being creatures of impulse, without reason or common sense. On the other hand. Houyhnhnms are glorified as tenacious adherents of these qualities. The satire on Yahoos is, by implication, a satire on the human beings who resemble! them so closely. Thus the fourth book is the most terrible satire on human lack of good sense and reason. Imitation of the Ancients :-
This glorification of reason also manifests itself in the form of the stress laid on the imitation of the ”ancients,” that is, the Greek and Romar writers of antiquity. It was thought contrary to reason to be led by one’: own impulses and eccentricities and to devise one’s own idiom foi expression. Too much of subjectivity was considered irrational. It wa believed that a man should cultivate unrefined and ”natural” taste b; subjecting it to the influence of classical writers. Much stress was laii
An Age of Prose and Reason / 249
on controlling and disciplining one’s heady feelings and wild imagination and ihc personal way of expression with the help of the study of the classics. We find in this century many translations and adaptations of the classics as also their ”imitations,” not to speak of then- rich echoes in most works of the century. The eighteenth century-particularly its first half-is also called the classical age of English literature on account of two reasons which W. H. Hudson enumerates as follows:
(i)”.. .the poets and critics of this age believed that the works of the writers of classical antiquity (really of the Latin writers) presented the best of models and the ultimate standards of literary taste.”
(ii)”… like these Latin writers they had little faith in the promptings and guidance of individual genius, and much in laws and rules imposed by the authority of the past.”
In 1700 Walsh wrote to Pope: The best of the modern poets in all languages are those, that have nearest copied the ancients.” Swift in The Battle of the Books showed the supremacy of the ancients over all the succeeding writers. Walsh’s expression copied the anfienls should not lead one to believe that eighteenth-century writers were no more than copyists and as such are open to the charge of plagiarism. What they copied was only the good taste and reason of the ancients. Well did Pope observe : Those who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients’ may as well say our Faces are not our own because they are like our Fathers.” Thus the ancients were to be respected as guides and models,not as tyrants. Among the ancients the most respected were the Latin writers of the age of Augustus and among them, too, particularly Virgil and Horace. The one reason why this age is called the Augustan age is this. However, the English ”ancients” tike Chaucer and Spenser were not respected. Addison in his critical poem Account of the Greatest English Poets observes about The Faerie Queene:
But now the mystic tale that pleased of yore Can charm an understanding age no more.
Chaucer is dismissed as a ”rude barbarian” who tries in vain to make the readers laugh with his jests in ”unpolished strain.” Thomas Rymer savagely criticised Shakespeare.
”First Follow Nature” :-
A.R. Humphreys observes :”Basically, the critical injunction which gained the widest, indeed,almost universal, acceptance was die call to ”follow Nature”. In the famous lines from Pope’s Essay on Criticism advice is tendered to writers:
250 /A History of English Literature
First follow Nature, and your judgement frame By her just standard, which is still the same : -: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear unchanged, and universal light. Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of Art.
Pope’s ”Nature was not the ”Nature” of the romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Augustans were not much interested in forests, flowers, trees, birds, etc. which inspired poets like Wordsworth. Nor did Pope and his contemporaries mean by ”Nature” that Nature which, to use th words of Louis I. Bredvold, ”Sir Isaac Newton had recently interpreted in terms of mathematical physics, in his Principia Mathematica (1687); they could hardly have gone to physics for a literary standard, and they were moreover well aware that their concept of Nature antedated Newton by centuries.” For them Nature indicated, what Bredvold calls, ”a rational and intelligible moral order in the universe, according to which the various experiences of mankind could be confidently and properly valued.” Nature to them meant, in the words of A. R. Humphreys, ”the moral course of the world or as ideal truth by which art should be guided.” Man’s subjective feelings were thus discredited and sacrificed to ”the laws of Nature.” As Basil Willey observes in The Nineteenth-Century Background, ”the individual mind was carefully ruled out of the whole scheme.” Even in the field of religion, reason and Nature ruled the roost. This was the age of the spread of natural religion or Deism which believed in the existence of God but disbelieved in any revealed religion, not excepting Christianity. People were also talking about ”natural morality.” The doctrines of the reason-loving Deists were repudiated by orthodox theofogists, not passionately but with reason.
Rules :-
This eighteenth-century emphasis on Nature often took the form of the emphasis on the ”rules’1 formulated by the ancients. These rules were supposed to be of universal applicability. Nature was the criterion of propriety, and the rules of the ancients were to be respected as they, in the words of Pope, ”are Nature still but Nature methodised.” And further,
Nature like liberty It but restrained By the tame lam which first hentlf ordained. The tendency to adhere to the rule went against the eecentrkities and imtfoMlirir of individual genius. The fightfreuli century was, mAct,
p
Rv
Ifr:
W
The Neo-Classical School of Poetry / 251
an age of formalism in all spheres-literature, architecture, gardening, and even social etiquette. A critic maintains : ”Just as a gentleman might not act naturally (that is, in accordance with his impulses), but must follow exact rules in doffing his hat, or addressing a lady, or entering a room, or offering his snuff-box to a friend, so the writers of this age lost individuality and became formal and artificial.”
Against Enthusiasm and Imagination :-
The adoration of reason naturally implied a keen distrust of en-
thusiasm and imagination which could lead a man to ludicrous extremes. Eighteenth-century literature is, consequently, devoid of the enthusiasm, elemental passion, mysterious suggestiveness, and heady imagination which characterize romantic literature. These romantic characteristics were discredited as they led one to violate Nature. If a writer abandoned himself to emotions or impulses, or let his imagination run away uncontrolled, the result could be disastrous for his writing. Sir Richard Blackmore observed in his ”Essay on Epick Poetry (inEssays upon Various Subjects) that the writers of old romances ”were seized with an irregular Poetick phrenzy,. and having Decency and Probability in Contempt, fill’d the world with endless Absurdities.” Swift in ”Letter to a Young Clergyman” expresses his distrust of the passionate eloquence of a particular preacher. ”I do not see,” says he, ”how this talent of moving the passions can be of any great use towards directing Christian men in the conduct of their lives.” In Section IX of A Tale of a Tub be scarifies the Puritan enthusiasm by representing it as wind. Likewise the Earl of Shaftesbury in his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) lashes religious enthusiasm and fanaticism.
Prose :- .-” ,
The eighteenth century was doubtlessly an age of great prose, but not of great poetry. When Matthew Arnold calls it an age of prose, he suggests that even the poetry of the period was of die nature of prose, or versified prose. It is he who observed that Dryden auid Pope are the classics not of our poetry but of prose. Among the greatest prose writers of the age are Addison, Steele, and Swift. They took English pose from the antiquity of Burton, Browne, and others to the balance, clarity, and simplicity of the modera times. They made prose functional, using it not for impressing but enlightening the reader. In the field of prose the reaction against romantic extravagance and involvedness, started by Dryden, was brought to a logical conclusion by the prose writers of the age of Queen Anne mentioned above.
I
252/A. History of Enelish Literature
In poetry, however, the age has not to show much excellence. Imagination and passion came to be replaced by the ideals of clearness, perspecuity, and beauty of expression. These ideals appear to some as the ideals of good prose, not good poetry. Regularity, order, and artistic control are certaintly desirable but no substitutes for poetic talent or inspiration. One may be tempted to ask with Roy Campbell: They use snaffle and the curb, all right. But where’s the bloody horse?” Comparing the poetry and prose of the eighteenth century, Long observes : ”Now for the first time we must chronicle the triumph of English prose. A multitude of practical interests arising from the new social and political conditions demanded expression not simply in books, but more especially in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers. Poetry was inadequate for such a task: hence the development of prose, of the ’unfettered word’ as Dante calls it–a development which astonishes us by its rapidity and excellence. The graceful elegance of Addison’s essays, the terse vigour of Swift’s satires, the artistic finish of Fielding’s novels, the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon’s history and of Burke’s orationsthesc have no parallel in the poetry of the age. Indeed, poetry itself bacame prosaic in this respect, and it was used not for the creative works of imagination but for essays, for satire, for criticism- for exactly the same practical ends as was prose. The poetry of the first half of the century, as typified by the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough, but artificial, it lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm, the glow of the Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. In a word, it interests us as a study of life, rather than delights or inspires us by its appeal to the imagination. The variety and excellence of prose works, and the development of a serviceable prose style, which had been begun by Dryden, until it served to express dearly every human interest and emotion,-these are the chief literary glories of the eighteenth century.”
/ THE NEO-CLASSICAL SCHOOL OF POETRY
Q 40 Enumerate the characteristics of the Neo-classical
poetry (Rohilkhand 1988, Garhwal 1985)
Or
Q. Describe the salient characteristics of neo-classical poetry with special reference to the poetry of Pope.
(RohllkhjuHi 1985) Or
The Neo-CIassical School of Poetry / 253
Q. Describe the salient characteristics of neo-classical poetry as it was developed by Dryden and Pope.
(Punjab 1973) Or
Q. What changes did poetry undergo during the neo-classical age?
(Agra 1967) Or
Q. What do you understand by the term ”Neoclassicism”? Point out the chief characteristics of neo-classical poetry.
(Rohilkhand, 1990)
Introduction :-
Generally, the period between 1680 and 1750 is called the Augustan age in English literature, for frequent comparisons were made between the literary activity of the England of this period and that of the Rome of Emperor Augustus which produced such poetic geniuses as Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and many others. Dr. Johnson in his characteristic way said that Dryden did for English poetry what Augustus had done for the city of Rome–”he found it brick and left it marble.” Dryden and Pope were the greatest poets of the Augustan age. They conscientiously looked to the writers of Greek and Roman antiquity for guidance and inspiration. However, most of all, they were influenced by the Roman poets of the age of Augustus. They discredited the tradition of the decadent metaphysicals and established a new school of poetry which has since come to be known as the neo-classical school of English poetry. Though something had already been done before Dryden by Denham and Waller yet much was left to be done by Dryden himself and, still later, by Pope. The neo-classicism of Dryden and Pope was representative of the spirit of the age. The Restoration age marked the dose of the genuine ”romanticism” of the Elizabethan period and also the decadent romanticism of the Jacobean and Caroline periods. The creative imagination, exuberant fancy, and extravagance of the past had no appeal for an age which saw the establishment of the Royal Society and the inauguration of a new era of experimental science. A critical spirit was aboard, and men stopped taking things for granted. The spirit of the age was analytic and
254 /A History of English Literature
inquisitive, not synthetic and naively credulous. It put a greater stress on reason and intellect than on passion and imagination. The neo-classical poetry of Dryden, Pope, and their contemporaries was a manifestation of this new spirit Respect for the Ancients :
Cazamian observes: ”The literary transition from the Renascence to the Restoration is nothing more or less than the progressive movement of a spirit of liberty at once fancSful.briBiant, and adventurous towards a rule and discipline both in inspiration and in form.” The nto-classicists were champions of common sense and reason and were in favour of normal generalities against the whims and eccentricities of individual genius. These normal generalities went under the term ”Nature. Pope’s advice to writers was to ”follow Nature.” Curiously enough, the slogan of Rousseau and the English romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge who reacted against the school of Pope, was also the same. But ”Nature” for the romantics meant something entirely different-primitive simplicity and the world of forests, flowers, birds, streams, etc. Dryden and Pope laid special stress on the imitation of the ancients and the observance of the rules formulated or adhered to by them. For the rules of the ancients were, in the words of Pope, ”Nature still, but Nature methodised.’! Neo-classical poets abundantly translated and adapted classical works. Thus Dryden gave a verse translation of Virgil, and Pope of Homer. These translations did not literally adhere to their originals. Thus, Bentiey observed that Pope’s translation Homer was a good poem but it was ”not Homer”. What is more important than literal fidelity, however, is the attempt at capturing the spirit of the original. And this Dryden and Pope did pretty well Even the original works of the English nee-classicists have rich echoes of classical writers. Influoice of the French Neo-ctasstdsts :-
The neo-classical school of Dryden and Pope was much influenced by the neo-classical French school of the age of Louis XIV which goes down in history as the ”golden” or ”Augustan” age of French literature. According to W. H. Hudson in An Outline History of English Literature, ”the contemporary literature of France was characterised by lucidity, vivacity, and-by reason of the close attention given to form-rcorrectness, elegance, and finish.. Jt was moreover a literature in which intellect was in the ascendant and the critical faculty always in control.” It was a literature of good sense and regularity and order. One of die important tenets of the French neo-classical criticism was the theory of lands or genres. Traditional criticism in the age oi Dryden and Pope also worked through a reverent attention to these
The Neo-Classical School of Poetry / 255
genres which the French critics had derived from the classics. Aristotle, the godhead of all criticism for the neo- classicists, had dealt with only two genres-epic and tragedy. But by t he middle of the seventeenth century many more genres came to be recognized and fit styles for them came to be fixed. The appropriateness of the style to the genrethe principle of decorum-came to be exalted to a veritable shibboleth. A hierarchy of genres found its establishment. John Dennis in 1704 spoke for his age when in ”The Groumds of Criticism in Poetry” he divided all genres into high and low groups, the first group comprising epic, tragedy, and ”greater lyrical poetry” (that is, the Pindaric ode) and the other, comedy and satire, thp little ode, and elegiac and pastoral poems. It is of interest to note that the ancients had to offer no example of the genre of mock epic. The English poets’ adopted this important genre from the French neo-classicists. The most influential mock epic was Boileau’s Le Lutrin which provided a model for such’ excellent English mock epics as Drydeim’s A/lac F/ecAraoe, Garth’s The Dispensary,aad Pope’s The Rape of the Eock and even Vie Dunciad. Realism, Didacticism, and Satire :
Much of romantic poetry is marked by an egregious lack of realism amounting at times to sheer escapism. Classicism, on the other hand, puts special emphasis on concrete reality and aims pre-eminently at edification and improvement of the .reader. That is why much of classical poetry is realistic, didactic, amd satiric. Almost all classical poets were men of action very much in tihe thick of life and its pressing affairs. They wrote with a very clear and concrete purpose, not just for the fun of it or for fulfilling a pressing necessity of self-revelation. Political, religious, and even personal satire became in the Augustan era the vogue of the day. If the neo-classical poet was not satiric, he was, at least, sure to be didactic. It is very rarely that we come across in this age such a poem as Pope’s Eloisa to Abelafd, which is ”a poem without a purpose” aiming neither at instruction nor at ridicule nor chastisement through satire. To quote some instances, Dryden’s Abatom andAchitophel and The Medal are political satires, and bis Mac Flechioe a personal satire. Pope’s most important poems, like The Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock, and Trie Epistle toArbuthnot, are all satires. Most of the rest of his poems like his ”Moral Essays”, are didactic in aim. A subject on which neo-classical poets showed much brilliance was dullness-the- dullness of some specific rivals or the collective dullness of all of them put together. The Dunciad and Mac Flecknoe show how dullness can serve as a target of brilliant satire. Some of neo-classical poems are too much topical in nature; and all of
256 A History of English Literature
them are full of contemporary references, and they need exhaustive annotation to become comprehensible to the reader of today who is unfamiliar with the atmosphere out of which these poems grew and which was very well known to the readers of that age. The poems of the romantics, on the other hand, are largely free from contemporary references, for the romantic poet, generally speaking, is not a man of action and affairs and scarcely lives on the common, humdrum earth. He lives, instead, in a world of his own fancy with
magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
”Vers de Sodete” :-
One explanation for the realism of neo-classical poetry is that the neo-classical poet wrote as a civilised man speaking to other civilised men, not, like a romantic poet, an eerie voice ”speaking from the clouds.” The works of neo-classical poets were appraised not in literary journals but in drawing-rooms and coffee-houses. Neo-classical poetry, then, is what the French call vers de societe. The aim of the neo-classical poet was not only self-revelation but arguing and convin cing with the help of either real logic or rhetoric (which has been called ”specious logic”). Satire also came in handy for the purpose. Being in all respects a normal member of the community, the neo-classical poet made it a point to write poems on festive or important public occasions such as the coronation of a king, the recovery from illness of a dignitary, a national victory in a battle; and so on. Dryden’s Astraea Redux commemorated the coronation of Charles II, his Armus Mirabilis had for its theme the Great Fire of 1666 and the defeat of the Dutch Fleet in the same year, his Medal was occasioned as a reaction against the jubilance of the Whigs at the release of the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1681 and their striking a medal in his honour. Addison’s The Campaign was written to commemorate the Allies’ victory in the battle of Blenheim. Much of Swift’s poetry is also occasional in nature. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and some other poems also got started off by one real
happening or another.
Being vers de societe, it is natural for neo-classical poetry to be town poetry, or even ”drawing-room poetry” having little contact with the ”barbarous” world of nature which to some romantics appealed as a deity and to all as a source of inspiration and a perennial theme for poetry. About this aspect of neo-classical poetry WH. Hudson observes: ”It is almost exclusively a ”town” poetry, made out of the interests of ’society in the great centres of culture. The humbler aspects of fife are neglected in it, and it shows no real love of nature, landscape, or
\
f
The Neo-Classical School of Poetry / 257
country things and peop.’e.” The neo-classicists were averse to the description of natural beautyv however appealing. Pope in his maturity disapproved of his earlier poem Windsor Forestbecause in it, to quote himself, ”mere description held the place of sense.” No Imagination or Passionate Lyricism :
Being cultured men of society, neo-classical poets held all passion as suspect, as something primitive and uncultured. Lyricism therefore declined and very few good lyrics were produced in the age of Dryden and Pope. Dryden did write a few good lyrics, but they, too, are ”classical” in spirit, for in them he1 was fully objective and rigorously correct. He never gave a free play to his emotions. In neoclassical poetry wit and intellect took the place of passion and imagination. It is only now and then that the neo-classical poet deals with human passion, as for instance Pope in his Eloisa to Abelard. Pope mostly dealt with poetry as if it were just an intellectual exercise to please himself and his friends and to frighten his enemies. He liked such poetic toys as acrostics, puzzles, puns, anagrams, and so on which showed his intellect and an rather than any deep poetic passion or inspiration. For instance, consider the following couplets by him which are expressive of wit rather than romantic poetic fury:
”Epigram engraved on the collar ofadogwhichlgave to His Royal
Highness”
I am his Highness’dog at Kew, Pray, tell me, sii; whose dog are you f
You Beat your Pate, and Fancy Wit will come; Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home.
”Epitaph”
Here Francis Charters lies. Be dvil; The rest God knows-perhaps the Devil I
M
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258 /A History of English Literature
”The Balance of Europe” Now Europe’s balanc’d, neither side prevails : Fornothing’d left in either of the Scales. Expression-toe Heroic Couplet :-
The neo-classical poet put a special premium upon beautiful and effective expression. He did not mind even if the thought sought to be expressed was stale. As Pope puts it,
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought but ne’er so well-express’d. The heroic couplet became with neo-classic poets the most favoured of verse measures. It was Dryden who took this measure from Waller and Denham and polished it into a very effective medium of narrative and satiric poetry. It was left for Pope to perfect the heroic couplet and to employ it as the effective expression for all kinds of poetry. R. P. C. Mutter and Kinkead-Weekes observe in Introduction to Selected Poems and Letters of Alexander Pope : ”From Dryden’s extremely varied achievement in the heroic couplet Pope learnt how it could be made flowing and easy, or packed and concise, how it could be wittily antithetical or tenderly elegiac.” Whereas neo-classical poets expressed themselves mostly in the heroic couplet or such ”recognized” measures as the heroic stanza (making exception for the irregular and intricate measures of the so-called Pindaric ode), romantic poets revived a large number of stanzaic patterns and invented many on their own. In the age of Dryden and Pope much stress was laid on the ”correctness” of sentiment and form, and the heroic couplet with all its neatness and precison embodied well the desired correctness of form.
THE HEROIC COUPLET
/
Q. 41 Write a brief essay on one of the following :-
(a) The Heroic Couplet (and five more topics).
(Agra 1962)
Or
Q. Write a short essay on one of the following subjects :- The heroic couplet (and four more subjects).
(Agra 1968)
Or Q. What is meant by the heroic ceuplet? Point out its
good qualities and defects. Name some famous poem written in couplets. (Agra 1966:
Or
The Heroic Couplet / 259
Q.
Q. Write short notes on any three of the following :- (g) Heroic couplet (and eight more topics).
(Vikram 1966) Or
Q. Write a critical note on one of following subjects :- The Heroic Couplet (and three more topics).
What is the Heroic Couplet?- (Vikram 1965)
A heroic couplet is a group of two lines rhyming at the end jboth the lines being iambic pentameters. Now, what is an iambic pentameter? A pentameter is a line consisting of five ”feet”; and if every one of these five feet is an ”iamb” or ”iambic foot’,” the line is an iambic pantameter. An iambic foot consists of two syllables, the first of which is unstressed and the second, stressed. For instance, the word divide makes an iambic foot in verse for its first syllable (ft) is unstressed and the second (vide) is stressed. In the same way the words given beiow make one iambic foot each:
belie, delay remain, between, and delight.
Now let us give an example of an iambic pentameter. This line occurs in Pope’s Epistle to a Iady:
But what are these to ff-eatAtossa’s mind? This line can be ”scanned” (that is, analysed metrically) as follows:
X__ v ,, Y M v .. Y
– A A ”” A A –
But what I are these I to great I Ato I ssa’smind Each vertical line divides one foot (here, one iambic foot) from the other, each cross indicates an unstressed syallable, and each horizontal line, a stressed syallable. It is by reading the line aloud that we can judge which syllable is to be stressed and which not. The iambic pentameter given above is the first of the two lines making up a heroic couplet. Let us now give the second line.
Scarce once herself, by turns all Womankind I It may be scanned as follows:
x –
Scarce once herself by turns all Wo mankind Both the lines together constitute a heroic couplet, as either of them is n iambic pantameter, and they rhyme at the end.
But what are these to great Atossa’s mind ?
Scarce once herself, by turns all Womankind I
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260/A History of English Literature
£
Now this is a normal heroic couplet. But the heroic couplet does admit of occasional variations. All good wielders of the heroic couplet use these variations to counteract the possibility of monotony caused ”by its peculiar singsong. We wall discuss these variations a little later, but let us here give a few more characteristics of a normal or regular heroic couplet They are as follows:
(i) The heroic couplet makes a self-contained unit, just as a stanza. It is, in fact, a stanza in its own right. Sometimes, however, the sense is allowed to overflow from one couplet to the next.
(ii) In each of the two lines of a heroic couplet there are generally two pauses (or stops)–one at the end (end-stop) and the other somewhere in the middle (middle-stop or caesura), usually after the fourth of sixtfi Syllable, and very often indicated by a punctuation mark such as a comma or a semicolon; In the first line of the heroic couplet quoted above, the caesura comes after the word these (fourth syllable) and in the second, after the syllable self (again, the fourth syllable).
(iii) The rhyme is limited to the ending syllables (mind and kind) both of which are accented.
Some Variations :-
(!) A heroic, couplet may not always form a self-contained unit. The sense may be allowed to flow from one couplet to the next. In other, words, the couplet may not be a closed one having a strong pause at the end. This overflowing of the sense from one couplet to the next is called enjantbcment. Almost all the wielders of the heroic couplet, including Dryden and Pope, allowed themselves considerable liberty for enjambement Consider, for instance, how Keats uses the couplets at the beginning of Endymion :
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever :
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still keep
A bower quiet for us, and sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. In this case the sentence structure is independent of the metre. The lines are not end-stopped.
(2) Sometimes the two lines (or one of the two lines) of a heroic couplet may not be exact pentameters. Instead of some iambic feet the poet may use some other land of feet. And sometimes even the number of syllables in each line may not be ten. ThusJnKeats’spassage quoted above, the first two lines consist of eleven syllables each.
The Heroic Couplet / 261
(3) Sometimes the caesura may not come at all. The absence of the caesura makes for speed.
i (4) Sometimes the rhyme may not be limited to the ending
syllables; it may extend to the two ending syllables of each line. Such a rhyme is called a double rhyme or feminine rhyme Forexampie : Then all for women, painting, rhyming drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
-from Drydcn’s Absalom and Achitophel (5) Sometimes (but seldom) the heroic couplet may give place to a triplet, that is, a set of three iambic pentameters all rhyming together or two iambic pentameters followed by a rhyming alexandrine (an iambic hexameter). Dryden was particularly devoted to the triplet-for which Pope took him to task.
Its Good Qualities and Defects :-
Like all other verse measure the heroic couplet has its good qualities as also defects. By its very nature the heroic couplet makes the fittest medium for certain kinds of poetry, but not for others. Its rapidity, balance, and .epigrammatic flavour render it suitable particularly for satiric and narrative poetry, and the very same qualities make it unsuitable for elegiac, tender, passionate, or lyrical verse. But we canrjt be too categorical in our statement, as in the hands of a master like Pope the heroic couplet can become a pliant medium for the expression of every mood and purpose. Pope’s Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, a wonderful elegy, is in heroic couplets. So is his passionate poem Eloisa toAbelard. R. R C Mutter and M. KinkeadWeekes observe in the Preface to the Selected Poems and Letters ofL i Alexander Pope: ’From Dryden’s extremely varied achievement in the heroic couplet Pope learnt how it could be made flowing and easy, or packed and concise, how it could spit like a firecracker or soar with eloquence, how it could be wittily antithetical or tenderly elegiac. The couplet may look monotonous as we see it on the page, but when we read it with attention as the poet’s art directs us, it is a highly flexible style. Pope used it for nearly all his poetry-for all his greatest-because
he could do anything with it that he wanted”. The following may be considered the ”good qualities1’ of the heroic couplet:
(i) As we have said, the heroic couplet makes for speed and brevity of expression. There is nothing languid or slumbrous about it as is the case with such verse forms as the Spenserian stanza.
(ii) The heroic couplet admits of balance and antithesis which tend rhetorical colour to verse and render it mote forceful for the purpose °f argument. Dryden was the greatest argucr in verse.
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(Hi) Its brevity and balance give the heroic couplet an epigrammatic flavour. Pope is among all the English poets the most quotable for he abounds in epigrams (short, witty, proverb-like sayings) which are evidently not possible with long stanzaic forms.
(iv) All the qualities enumerated above make the heroic couplet the most eligible medium of satiric poetry. It is not an accident that the golden age of English satire was also the golden age of the heroic couplet. For one thing, the satirist can deliver in heroic couplets his appraisal of the satiric target in the form of short and pithy points which look like proverbs or axioms impossible to be controverted. Many of Dryden’s heroic couplets, according to George Saintsbury, have the sound of an actual slap in-the face.
(v) The use of the heroic couplet demands a peculiar discipline from the poet. The conformity of the sentence structure to the metre demands that he should think not in long sentences but couplets. Thus he cannot afford to be slack or flaccid.
Here are some of the ”defects” of the heroic couplet : (i) The greatest ”defect” of the heroic couplet is the possiblity of its growing monotonous. In the hands of not so eood a poet it runs the very serious danger of degenerating into mere singsong. However, a poet like Dryden or Pope knows how to vary his metre, and thus avoid montony. This charge against the heroic couplet can, in fact, be adduced against any other measure too. Thus many critics have disapproved of the cloying monotony of such a complex form as the Spenserian stanza, and at least F. R. Leavis has criticised what he calls the ritualistic colour of Milton’s blank verse.
(ii) Another ”defect” is the incapability of the heroic couplet to serve as a fit measure for poetry other than satiric and narrative-specially, tender or passionate poetry. But here again the defect is not so much in the measure as in the poet. We have already cited the instance of Pope who could do anything with the heroic couplet. However, it has to be admitted that very few tender, elegiac, or passionate poems have been written in heroic couplets. Few lyricists haw used this form.
(iii) The rhetorical colour of the heroic couplet detracts from the sincerity of sentiment sought to be expressed by the poet. The poet using heroic couplets sounds like a public speaker and not a person giving sincere expression to sincere feelings. You can argue through heroic couplets, but you cannot move anybody with them; The History of the Heroic Couplet and Some ”oeras Written in it :-
The heroic couplet was first used by Chaucer who adopted it perhaps from old French verse. Some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as also the Prologue are in couplets. At the end of the sixteenth century,
The Heroic Oouplet/263
Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare made various uses of the heroic couplet. Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale (1597) is a satirnc narrative in heroic couplets. In Michael Drayton’s England’s Henitcal Epistles, again, we find the use of the couplet. The last two lines of every sonnet by Shakespeare consitute a heroic couplet. Some of thesecouplets look furiously like the couplets of Dryden and Pope. For instances, consider the following one :
For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues toprdse. Edward Fairfax in his translation of Tasso’s Godfrey ofBulloigne (1600) used the same measure, and was named by Dryden himself as one of the earliest reformers of English prosody. Thoe group of Elizabethan satirists including Donne, Lodge, Hall, andMIarston also had recourse to the couplet, but their couplets are uneven iand rugged and flagrantly disdainful of its discipline. Sir John Beaumomt wrote his Bosworth Fieldin couplets which a/e instinct with sweetoesss and have: an even flow. Sir George Sandys used the heroic ecu: piet in his Metamorphoses (1621-26); but his couplets were neitlenr pithy nor uniform. Incidentally, Sandys was praised by Dryden as ”the best versifier of the former age.” Milton used heroic couplets forr four of his Cambridge poems, but in their freedom, they look moreli-ke rhymed blank verse. Edmund Waller was recognised by both Drydem and Pope as their master. Denham wrote his Cooper’s Hill in coupolets which resemble Waller’s. Cleveland’s political poems also used the heroic couplet. His couplets are not smooth, but they have tie important quality of directness.
With Dryden and Pope we come to the real masters of” the heroic couplet. They made the couplet regular and correct anda.t the same time a very flexible and polished medium of poetic expression. Dryden wrote no fewer than thirty thousand couplets. He used the couplet not only for his narrative and satiric poems like Absalom andMchitophel, The Medal, Mac Flecknoe, and The Hind and the Panther, b»ut also for his ”heroic tragedies” hkeAureng-Zebe and The Conquest off Granada. Pope perfected the couplet. All his important poems, like TNie Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Essay on Man, and Essay on Criticism, are in couplets. Pope’s contemporaries like Addison, Prior, Gay,: Swift, and Ambrose Philips also employed the heroic couplet for their rnumerous works; After them the most important and the ”weightiest” nvielder of the heroic couplet is Dr. Johnson whose Vanity.of Human Washes is his greatest work. The vogue of the couplet declined after him as roman-
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ticism spread in the air and poets started gradually turning away from
4he conventions of the neo-classical school of Dryden and Pope. However, off and on, there did come poems in heroic couplets. Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) is the most notable example. Byron was indeed the most ”classical” of all romantic poets.
POETIC DICTION
Q. 42. Write a note on eighteenth century poetic diction.
(Agra 1966)
Or Q. Write a critical note on one of the following :-
(b) the formation of ’poetic diction’ (Vikram 1961)
What is Poetic Diction :
English neo-classical poets, like their French counterparts, were very particular about the division of poetry into various kinds of genres-such as the elegy, the heroic poem, the satire, the epic, and so on. They upheld the principle of decorum which demands that for every kind a particular style is needed and that there should not be any confusion of styles. Further, they drove a wedge between the language of prose and the language of serious poetry. For lower genres like satire, they did not mind using the language and idiom of prose, but for the’ elegy, the heroic poem, the epic, and suchlike genres, what they aimed at employing was a language as far removed from the lowly prose as I possible. Obviously, in an epic such words as pot, broom, or even door’ could not be used, as their presence would create a bathetic effect Consequently, a special language of poetry Was devised, and later traditionalised, by the practice of po after poet. This speical language, somewhat stilted and artificial/ruled the roost for decades and was challenged only by Wordsworth at the end of the eighteenth century. In the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) Words worth vehemently protested against what he called ”the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers”. He further protested There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually callec poetic diction; as much pain has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it.” Wordsworth was against the very principle of the divison of language into the language of prose and the language o poetry. He went so far as to assert that ”there neither is, nor can bcanj essential difference between the language of prose and metrical com position-Poetry sheds no tears ’such as Angels weep’, but natural an human tears: she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes he
PoeticDiction/265
vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of both.” Coleridge in Biopaphia Literaria controverted Wordsworth’s point of view. He maintained that there ought to be some difference between the language of poetry and that of prose, as there should be some difference between the language of prose and that of actual conversation. ”I write,” said Coleridge, ”in metre because I am about to use a language different from that of prose.” It may be pointed out here that Wordsworth did not only criticise the language (diction) used by many of his predecessors but also their frequent indulgence in archaisms (both of grammar and vocabulary) and various other ”poetic licences” pressed into service for poetising their language and consequently removing it as far from the language of prose as possible. Robert Bridges in his essay ”Poetic Diction in English” in Collected Essays (1910) observes: ”The revolt against the old diction is a reaction which in its general attitude is rational: and it is in line with the reaction of The Lake School” of poetry, familiar to all students in Wordsworth’s statement, and Coleridge’s criticism and correction of that statement in laBiographia Literaria. Both movements alike protest against all archaisms of vocabulary and grammar and what are called literary forms and plead for the simple terms and direct forms of common speech.” Its History and Examples :-
It is usual to blame Dryden and Pope-the protagonists of the neoclassical school of poetry-as the poets who established the so-called poetic diction in England. However, it is not Dryden and Pope but their imitators who ought to be blamed,for it was they whothought that poetic diction could be a substitute for poetic inspiration. But poetry is not diction alone. It is so many thing besides. ”In all fields of Art,” observes Robert Bridges in the essay mentioned above, ”the imitators are far more numerous than the artists and they will copy the externals: in poetry/ the Versification and the Diction which in their hands become futile”. Eighteenth-century poetic diction does not start with Pope. The vast fund of poetic diction could not be created overnight. It was rather the cumulative result of the efforts of a large number of poets spread over many years.
Nevertheless,broadly speaking, it is Joshua Sylvester who can be credited with the use for the first time of that peculiar phraseology which goes under the label of poetic diction. In his verse translation of the French poet Du Bartas epic La Semaine we come across numberless ”poetic ornaments” and extravagances which are rather unimaginatively flung here, there,, and everywhere. Both Du Bartas in
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his original French composition and Sylvester in his English translation employed a very large number of expressions derived from Latin instead of their native equivalents. Such expressions ultimately formed a fairly large proportion of poetic diction. The tendency of Du Bartas and Sylvester to use Latinisms was chiefly dictated, apart from the consideration of ornamental value, by their search for compression. Verbs and participial adjectives derived from Latin were evidently more concise than their composite equivalents in French and English. For illustration see the following lines by Sylvester r A novice Thief (that in a Closet spies A heap of Gold, that on the Table lies) Pale, fearful, shivering twice or thrice extends, And twice or thrice retires his fingers’ends.
Ah unpurgedAire to Water would resolve, And Water would the mountain tops involve.
Another method of compression employed by Sylvester and the later poets was of the ”pictorial’’ kind. For instance, for the loadstone, ”iron mistress”; for the sea,””watery camp”; for the fish, ”scaly crew”; and so on. A very common procedure was to frame a two-worded phrase with ”round” as the second word and some epithet as the first. All these practices contributed towards the proliferation of eighteenth-century poetic diction.
Many poets of the seventeenth century accepted the lead of Sylvester. Among them may be mentioned Drayton, William Browne, Sandys, Benlowes, Milton, and Dryden. Sandys, the translator of Ovid, did the most, before Dryden, to popularise poetic diction through his own example. He had taken upon himself the task of translating Ovid into an almost equal number of lines in English. Moreover, he was to employ pentameters, not the hexameters of the original. This put him to the necessity of compression, more particularly because Latin itself is a much more concise language than English. Naturally enough, Sandys had to have a recourse to the methods of Sylvester and also to devise a number of formulas of his own. The result was that the language of metrical composition moved farther and farther from the language of prose or the language of actual conversation which was to be advocated by Wordsworth for use in metrical composition.
The translations of Lucan rendered by Thomas May (1626-27) and Rowe (1718) show much indebtedness to Sylvester and Sandys. So do
Poetic Diction/ 267
Milton’s minor and some of his major poems. In Lycidas, for instance, Milton uses various phrases which have the ring of poetic diction and many more which are used for their poetic beauty and even ”unnaturalness”. Dr. Johnson expressed his keen dislike of Lycidas on the ground that much in it was unnatural or away from common experience. After Milton it was Dryden, the founder of the neo-classical school of poetry, who really established poetic diction so firmly that it continued reigning uninterrupted for about a hundred years to follow. Specifically speaking, it was in his translation of Virgil that, to maintain the dignity of the original, he employed highstrung diction. In his satires, however, his diction and idiom are nearer the language .of prose. Satire, as we have already pointed out, was considered by the neo-classicists a low genre, and, as such, was not deemed to require any specially wrought diction and idiom.
The Role of Pope :-
In this respect Pope thought alike with Dryden. In his satires we have not much of the so-called poetic diction. They are couched in a conversational lauguage unadorned with poetic gewgaws. Consider, for instance, the opening lines of his Epistle to Arbuthnot: Shut, shutjhe door, good John Ifatigu’d I said, Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.
Pope was very much particular about the demands of decorum-the appropriateness of the style to the subject or the genre. As he says in the Essay on Criticism f
Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable; For dijfrent styles with dijfrent subjects sort, As several garbs with country, town and court. In practice he was very particular even about the style of his letters. Spence reports these words of Pope: ”It is idle to say that letters should be written in an easy familiar style: that, like most other general rules, will not hold. The style, in letters as in all other thingsshould be adapted to the subject”.
It is in his translation of Homer that Pope makes the maximum use of poetic diction. Pope felt that the sublimity and grandeur of the original were incapable of being conveyed in ordinary, familiar English phrases. So he had to coin new ones and had to borrow numerous others from his predecessors. His Homer has been almost universally and wholly held responsible for the creation of eighteenth-century
::
268 / A History of English Literature
poetic diction. To quote some opinions. Consider first Coleridge’s who called it ”the main source of our pseudo poetic diction.” Southey asserted that it had ”done more than any or all other books, towards the corruption of our poetry.” Whatever be the other faults of Pope’s Homer, it is evident that is was not the originator of poetic diction. Pope was merely following a tradition and passing it on to his successors. Geoffrey Tillotson observes in this connexion: ”Pope’s Homer is certainly the greatest work which used this diction. But Pope did not invent the diction. When he used it he was drawing from and adding to a fund which had been growing for more than a hundred years, a fund which has been augmented and improved by the ’progressive poets of the seventeenth century, that is, by those who stand in the direct line of development.”
Pope used poetic diction in his Homer with a definitely utilitarian purpose in view. The compression, sublimity, and archaic flavour of the original could be captured, he felt, only by the use of a peculiar diction. He did not use it, as many of his successors did, for the purpose of ornament or for camouflaging in attractive trappings the spells of poetic sterility. He would, as he tells us,
Show no mercy to an empty line.
Pope is one of the most concise of English poets, though, to quote Tillotson i again, he ”makes no fuss about his conciseness as Browning does.”1 The only senselessly prolix lines in his poetry are those in which he parodies the senseless prolixity of others. This is how he satirises the emptiness of his rivals in pastoral poetry : Of gentle Philips will I ever sing, With gentle Philips shall the valleys ring. My numbers too for ever wilt I vaty With gentle Budgelt and with gentle Carey. Or if in ranging of the names Ffudge ill, Wih gentle Carey and with gentle BudgeU.
Pope, in fact, condemns the needless, unthinking use of poetic diction. In PcriBathous he lashes the foolish poets who, as he puts it, instead of writing the plain shut the door (as he himself wrote in the first line of the Epistle to Arbuthnot quoted above) write : The wooden guardian of our privacy, Quick on Us axle turn.
/. Swift wrottadout Pope: .
He am in one couplet fa. The sense that I can do in six.
– English Vfersc Satire in the Eighteenth Century / 269
After Pope :-
After Pope poetic diction ruled supreme right till the end of the eighteenth century. The names of almost all the poets of the century are associated with its use. Dr. Johnson, Collins, Cowper-all made use of it and augmented and consolidated its fund. Wordsworth in the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads quotes verses from Dr. Johnson, Cowper, and Gray and points out bow their diction differs from the words used in speech and in written prose. He calls them bad poetry for this reason. Those who really did the most mischief were not these poets, however, but the numberless imitators of Pope who made the language of poetry altogether fantastic, and altogether lifeless and , conventional. Hence Wordsworth’s reaction came not a day too soon. However, Wordsworth went to the opposite extreme. In the keen desire for fresh air a few windows are likely to get broken. In condemning the poetic diction of the eighteenth century, Wordsworth went to the extent of condemning all the poetry which employed this diction. Hence Tillotson’s complaint: ”The poetic diction of good eighteenth-century poetry has been much, misunderstood, and denunciation of it has sometimes been taken as the automatic denunciation of the poetry as a whole”. We must allow eighteenth-century English poetry its due, in spite of our disapproval of its poetic diction.
V
. \ f ENGUSH VERSE SATIRE IN THE
tV EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Q.43. Trace the growth of verse satire in the 18th century.
(Punjab 170) Or
Q. Trace the development of English verse satire in the eighteenth century. (Agra 1966)
(Companion Question). Give an account of satire in eighteenth century writing. (Vikram 1966) Introduction :-
The eighteenth century is remarkable as a period in which the satiric spirit reigned supreme. The names of all the important writers are associated with satire; in fact, their very greatness is due mainly to their greatness as satirists. The three most important writers of the ae were Pope, Swift, and,Dr. Johnson. Whereas Pope and Dr. Johnson gave the English language some of its best verse satires, the second named gave.it its best prose satires. But apart from this redoubtable
270 /A History of English Literature
triumvirate, the names of a hundred other lesser satirists can be mentioned. In addition to the regular satires, the satiric spirit peeps through other modes of writing, too. The novel and the periodical paper were the two important gifts of the eighteenth century to English literature. These new genres, too, are exhibitive of the impact of the satiric spirit which was ubiquitous in the age. Some of the most delightful satire of the age is provided by the periodical papers of Steele, Addison, and their followers and the novels of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. As a genre satire ruled the roost till roughly the third quarter of the century, when new tendencies appeared, to the detriment of the satiric spirit. The precursors of Romanticism found satire incompatible with their new sensibility. Satire naturally declined and since then up to the present day very few satires have appeared which can show the same brilliance as characterised eighteenth-century satires:
Reasons for Dominance :-
All satire arises from the sense of dissatisfaction, despair, amusement, anger, or disgust at the departure of things from their ideals. Satire aims at pointing out and chastising the falling short of things from their well-accepted standards of excellence. It is only when standards get fixed that any departure from them can be measured or appreciated. In the eighteenth century-particularly its first half–the standards of human conduct were more or less well fixed. This century has been variously called ”the age of good sense,” ”the age of good taste,” ”the age of reason”, etc. Almost all the writers of the age harped upon common sense, good taste, and what they called ”right reason.” Any departure from them, real or imaginary, put the whip of the satirist into action. Further the accentuation of the political division of Englishmen into Whigs and Tories also nurtured and provided much material for the satiric spirit. Nearly every important writer of the first half of the eighteenth century was ”employed” by either the Tory or the Whig party to further its cause and to down its opponents. Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Prior, Addison, Steele-all were actively aligned with one party or the other, even though they did not write many political satires of the nature of Dryden-’s Absalom and Achitophel and Tlie Medal. Thirdly, we have to take into account the fierce personal animosities of the writers of the age. It was in the eighteenth century that, for the first time in the history of English literature, the vocation of a man of letters, like other professions,became a lucrative job. With the unprecedented increase in the number of readers (consequent mainly upon the expansion of trade and commerce and the resulting richness) the
English Verse Satire in the Eighteenth Century/ 271
printed word could sell. Pope and some others depended for their livelihood entirely upon the patronage of their readers. With the phenomenal rise in the number of readers there was an equally phenomenal rise in the number of writers many of whom decorated the garrets of Grub Street. Each of them was necessarily jealous of all the rest as it involved his very livelihood. The whole air was thick with mutual animosities among writers and the personal satires which they gave rise to. Even Pope’s Dunciad-lhe most powerful and the.best satire of the eighteenth century-was expressly written to lash his literary rivals and critics. His translation of Homer and edition of Shakespeare had proved for him the most lucrative assets and when they were attacked, partly justly and partly unjustly, by critics ,like Bentley and Theobald it was reason enough for him to try to satirise them into silence.
Formative and Guiding Influences :-
There were three formative and guiding influences on satire in the eighteenth century. They were: the tradition of the Roman Augustan satire of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius; the tradition of the French satire of the neo-classic school; and the neo-classical native tradition of Dryden. The French satirists like Boileau were themselves influenced by the Roman satirists and Dryden was influenced by both the Roman and the French. Let us now consider these three influences one by one.
(i) As regards the influence of the Roman satirists, it is quite apparent in the work of Pope, Dr. Johnson, and others. Horace and Juvenal–the two greatest Roman satirists-did not write the same kind of satire. Horation satire is, generally speaking, of the comic, and Juvenalian satire, of the tragic, kind. Horace is polished, goodhumoured, precise but sly, pretty tolerant and somewhat lenient, and always indirect. Juvenal, on the other hand, is mordant, direct, intolerant, stately, intense, and disdainful. Whereas Pope came mostly under Horace’s influence, Dr. Johnson was evidently influenced by Juvenal.
(ii) Boileau was the most important of the neo-classical French satirists. Dryden himself came under his influence. Boileau’s Le Lutrin was presumably the first example of a mock-heroic poem in world literature. Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe was also a mock epic. In the eighteenth century we find Pope giving a mock-heroic framework to his famous satires-TTie Rape of the Lock and Tlie Dunciad. Swift,
I. However, it was believed by many in the eighteenth century that Homer himself had written a mock epic which had since been lost
is
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likewise, followed the lead of Boileau in Tlie Battle of the Books. Scarron, the French poet who parodied Virgil,had also some followers in eighteenth-century England. . .
(iii) Last but not least is the bracing influence of Dryden who. breaking away from the native satiric tradition of Hall, Marston, Donne, Cleveland, and Butler, had looked for guidance to the Roman satirists and their followers in France. Pope has well been designated ”Dryden’s poetical son.” His satires provided so, many models for numerous eighteenth-century satirists. Tlie Dunciad followed Mac Flecknoe in being a satire on dunces. But what is more, Drydcn’s popularisation and effective handling of the heroic couplet for the purpose of satire had a powerful effect on the eighteenth century. Almost all the good satires of this century were written in heroic couplets. Pope regularised the couplet and made it more precise, balanced, and artistic and, as such, provided a model for his successors. But Dryden’s freer use of the couplet had also its admirers and imitators among whom may be mentioned the name of Churchill.
After these preliminary considerations, let us examine briefly the satiric work of important individual writers. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) :-
Pope, ”the wasp of Twickenham, was the greatest verse satirist of not only the eighteenth century but of all centuries. It is interesting to note that almost every discussion of his satire boils down to discussion of his personality. The phase of outright condemnation of Pope as a mischievous and malicious imp is now over. To quote Bredvold in A History of English Literature, edited by Hardin Craig, ”recent scholarship has made important corrections of the traditional view of Pope and he is now receiving a more sympathetic hearing.” We no longer agree to such views as the one of Lytton Strachey which represents Pope as a malevolent monkey sitting in a window and pouring on the passers-by (for whom he has dislike) ladlefuls of boiling oil. Sometimes Pope did hit first, but more often he was hit first. Pope himself was designed by God to be a rich satiric target. He was short-statured1, hunch-backed, and lame. And then lie was a Roman Catholic. But, above all, he was a successful writer-the author of numerous bestsellers. Naturally enough, he excited the spleen of a host of pendrivers whom at a place he compares to a swarm of gnats plaguing
I. His height was only four and a half feet
English Verse Satire in the Eighteenth Century/ 273 him. We have also to trke into account his revengeful and somewhat malicious temperament. After getting hit he could not just connive at the attack. He rose from the depths of anger and disgust and made short work of most of his disparagers. None could match him in his most telling use of the heroic couplet. Well could he claim that he was ”proud to see”
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.
Happily did he keep politics and religion out of satire. With the exception of Tlie Rape of the Lock, which is a general satire on female frivolities, all his major satires are characterised by indulgence in personalities. To name all the persons he attacked in his satires would require tens of pages. His greatest satire Tlie Dunciad is, in its fundamentals, a satire on the contemporary dunce’s who had happened to offend him.
Pope’s Friends :-
Pope’s companions-Arbuthnot, Swift, Prior, and Gay~who were, like him, members of the Tory ”Scriblerus Club”-also distinguished themselves as satirists. But Arbuthnot wrote only in prose. Swift, as we have already said, was the greatest prose satirist of the age. But he also wrote some verse satires. He seldom used the heroic couplet and couched almost all his verse satires in the octosyllabic couplet of Butter’s Hudibras. Most of them do not rise above the level of the doggerel. ”Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet”-this was the verdict of Dryden. And he was right. Much of Swift’s verse, as his prose, is besmirched in scatological grossncss. Swift takes an almost morbid pleasure in dwelling on the filth of the human ««,»:-’– bnHv H:~: ’
–
Had you but through a cranny syp ’d On house of ease your future bride, In all the postures of her face, Wliich nature gives in such a case; Distortions, groanings, strainings, heavings, ’Twere better you had licked her leavings Tlianfrom experience find too late Your goddess grown a filthy mate.
I. Even in The Rape of the Lock we have at least one clearly recognisable satiric , portrait of a contemporary-Belinda’s uncle.
274 A History of English Literature
It is nothing more than chamber-pot poetry. However, Swift is delightfully ironical in such poems as Tlic Death of Dr. Swift and Tlie Furniture of a Woman’s Mind which arc happily free from the scatological taint.
Matthew Prior’s (1664–1721) contribution to satire is his parody of Drydcn’s Tlie Hind and the Panther entitled Story of the Country Mouse (1687), and his Hudibrastic satire on philosophy, entitled Alma; or, Tlie Progress ofUie Mind,\n which he traces the advance of the soul from the ankles in childhood to the head in maturity. Prior is best known not for satire, however, but for his light, topical Anacreontic verse and his numerous poems for children.
John Gay (1685-1732) showed better talent for burlesque than Prior did. ”Informality and burlesque,” says George Sherburn, ”permeated most of Gay’s works.” His most important work The Beggar’s Opera also was a satire on and a parody of the Italian opera so popular then. Wine is again a burlcsquc-of Ambrose Philip’s Cyder. Trivia, or Tlie~Art of Walking the Streets in London is a parody of the Georgics of Virgil. It was the most famous of the ”town eclogues” written also by such writers as Swift, Lady Mary WortleyMongtagu, and some others. Gay, at any rate, did not taint his page with bitter satire. His satire is mostly impersonal and essentially good-natured and gay. His tombstone carries the following inscription composed by himself: Life is a jest, and all things show it, I thought so once, but now I know it.
We may also refer here to the work of Edward Young (1683-1765) who was one of the first imitators of Horace in the eighteenth century. Sherburn observes: ”The first Horation satires to achieve real success were the seven that Edward Young published in 1725-28 as Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. Practically all of Pope’s satires post dated those of Young, which were highly praised.” Dr. Johnson (1709-84) :
Dr. Johnson as a satirist ranks next only to Pope among the verse satirists of the eighteenth century. In addition to being a satirist he was, to quote Legouis in/1 Short History of English Literature, a ”translator, journalist, lexicographer, commentator, novelist, biographer and finally literary critic.” His two verse satires are London(1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1746)- the latter of which is superior to the former, Londonis a satire on the great city which he loved so passionately. There is ”the language of the heart” in his question: ”when can starving merit find a home?” There is real pathos in the lines which describe the misfortunes of talented and enlightened men of letters
English Verse Satire in the Eighteenth Century/275
who are rudely treated by rich fools. The Minify of Human Wishes is, according to Edmund Gosse, ”a much finer and more accomplished production.” Johnson based this weighty poem on the Tenth Satire of Juvenal whose manner he tried, fairly successfully, to imitate. Johnson’s style is heavy-handed and serious, and his attitude, too, is Juvenalian in its pessimism and noble disdain. He has often been charged Wh verbosity and prosaicness; and Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads gave him a rather undue meed of dispraise. However, modern critics, after the example of T. S. Eliot, have rehabilitated him as a poet. T. S. Eliot praises his poetry for, what he calls, its ”minimal quality –that of direct, complete; and effective statement. Referring to a passage in The Unity of Human Wishes he justly enquires if it is not poetry, what is it ?
Charles Churchill (1731-64) and Minor Satirists :-
After Johnson we find in the rest of the century lew satirists of his staturenot to speak of that of Pope. The most outstanding among the numerous minor satirists was Charles Churchill-a man of dissolute and ferocious character who died young of dissipation. He failed in the vocation of a clergyman, and in utter disgust of the world started writing extremely mordant satire against whosoever crossed his way. He was particulary severe on Dr. Johnson and the famous painter and engraver Hogarth. He keenly disliked Pope, and in the handling of the heroic couplet he followed theleadof Drydenwhohad handled it with much greater freedom than Pope. Much of his satire is of the personal kind . and scarcely rises above corase lampoonery. But there is always in it a devilish strength. Churchill was particulary good at the art of satiric portraiture and his portrait of Pomposo (Dr. Johnson) in The Ghost (1762-63) is quite remarkable. Tlie Tunes (1764) was a general satire on the vices of Londoners. Tlie Duellist was a virulent attack on Warburton and Lord Sandwich, as they were against Churchill’s hero John Wilkes who had incurred the wrath of George III. Tlie Rociad (1761) was a very vigorous satire on some famous actors of the day. Edmund Gosse observes about Churchill: The happiness of others is a calamity to him; and his work would excite in us the extremity of aversion, if it were not that its very violence betrays the exasperation and wretchedness of its unfortunate author.”
William Cowper (1731-1800) is much less known.for his satiric toan non-satiric verse. His Poems (1782) contains many satiric pieces On such subjects as Tlie Progress of Error, Truth, Hope and Charity, Conversation and Retirement. William Blake (1757-1827) was a poet ° his own kind. Some of his poems like Londonare satirical in temper.
1
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Among the little known poets may be mentioned John Wolcot, an opponent of George III (like Churchill) who witote Tlie Lousiad. William G if ford in The Baviad (1794) and Tlie Maevipd (1795) satirised bad critics and poets now justly forgotten. Canning and Frere in , Anti-Jacobian denounced the revolutionary zeal of poets like Southey and Coleridge. The last twenty years of the eighteenth century were a period of singular inactivity as regards not only satiric poetry but all poetry.
/ EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE
Q. 44. Write a short essay on the development of English prose in the eighteenth century. (Agra 1962, Garhwal 1984)
Introduction :–
The eighteenth century was a great period for English prose, .though not for English poetry. Matthew Arnold called it an ”age of prose and reason,” implying thereby that no good poetry was written in this century, and that prose dominated the literary realm. Much of the poetry of the age is prosaic, if not altogether prose-rhymed prose. Verse was used by many poets of the age for purposes which could be realised, or realised better, through prose. Our view is that the eighteenth century was not altogether barren of real poetry. Even then, it is better known for the galaxy of brilliant prose writers that it threw up. In this century there was a remarkable proliferation of practical interests which could best be expressed in a new kind of prose- pliant and of a workaday kind capable of rising to every occasion. This prose was simple and modern, having nothing of the baroque or Ciceronian colour of the prose of the seventeenth-century writers like Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Practicality and reason ruled supreme in prose and determined its style. It is really strange that in this period the language of prose was becoming simpler and more easily comprehensible, but, on the other hand, the language of poetry was being conventionalised into that artificial ”poetic diction” which at the end of the century was so severely condemned by Wordsworth as ”gaudy and inane phraseology.”
The Contribution of the Age to Prose :–
; Much of eighteenth-century prose is taken up by topical journalistic issues as indeed is the prose of any other age. However, in the eighteenth century we come across, for the first time in the history of English literature, a really huge mass of pamphlets, journals, booklets, and magazines.
Eighteenth-Century Prose / 277
The whole activity of life of the eighteenth century is embodied in the works of literary critics, economists, ”letter-writers,” B essayists, politicians, public speakers, divines, philosophers, hisPtorians, scientists, biographers, and public projectors. Moreover, a thing of particular importance is the introduction of two new prose genres in this century. The novel and the periodical paper are the two gifts of the century to English literature, and some of the best prose of the age is to be found in its novels and periodical essays. Summing up the importance of the century are these words of a critic :
”The eighteenth century by itself had created the novel and practically created the literary history. it had put the essay into general circulatione. It had hit off various forms and abundant supply of lighten verse. It had added largely to philosophy and literature. Above all, it had shaped the ’form of English prose-of-all-work, the one thing that remained to be done at its opening. When an age has done so much, it seems somewhat illiberal to reproach it with not doing more.” Even Matthew ; Arnold had to call the eighteenth century ”our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century.”
After these preliminary considerations let us briefly discuss the important trends and writers of the age.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) :-
Defoe was perhaps the most copious writer of the eighteenth century. He is best known for his Robinson Crusoe and some other works of fiction like Moll Flanders and Roxana. His non-fictive prose consists of a large number of pamphlets (generally published anonymously) and a staggering bulk of miscellaneous writings mostly topical in nature. He started a tri-weekly periodical The Review in 1704, which continued up to 1713. In it he dealt with political, religious,and commercial matters. There is not much of the universal in his nonfictive prose to keep it alive, but one just wonders at the sheer number of his works which total above five hundred. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) :-
Arbuthnot-”a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety”1- was a close associate of Swift and Pope and was by profession a physician. His History of John Bull (1712), an allegorical satire, in the words of Lcgouis in A Short History of English fJienture, ”remains one of the most famous political satires England has produced”. Therein 4s described the legal battle between John Bull (England) and Nic Frog (Holland) on the oue side, and Lewis Baboon (France) and Lord Strutt (Spain) on the other. Arburthnot upholds
1-Dr. Johnson’s tribute
278 /A History of English Literature
evidently the Tory point of view favouring the termination of hostilities then raging between the countries mentioned above. He manifests an easy mastery of lucid and vivid style as also delightful strokes of irony which made Swift ”complain:
Arbuthnot is no more my friend;
He date to irony pretend;
Wliich I was bom to introduce,
Refm’d it first and shew’d its use.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) :-
Swift was the greatest prose satirist of England. He dominated the first half of the eighteenth century as Dr. Johnson did the second; and as an intellectual he was far superior to Johnson. Some of his satires are obscene, misanthropic, and cynical, but none can question his moral integrity and the unflinching earnestness with which he removes the externals of things to bring out the corruption which lies at their heart. Swift’s satire is all-embracing. Its rapier-like thrusts spare neither a fraudulent almanac-maker, nor a misguided zealot, nor an airy philosopher, nor a glib politician, nor a conceited fop, nor a pretentious scientist. This greatest of satirists once satirised even satire! The paltry Partridge (an almanac-maker) and the great Walpole (the Prime Minister of England) alike winced under his terrible ”whip of scorpions”.
Swift’s sensitiveness to all corruption, the numerous frustrations which punctuated the entire span of his life and the egregious folly, corruption, and self-seeking which he found tainting the ”the age of reason and good sense” prompted him to take up his lash. The age deserved satire, and his personal disposition and disappointments made him keen enough to give it. Swift is perfectly right when he says in The Death of Dean Swift:
Perhaps I may allow the Dean Had too much satire in his vein, And seemd determined not to starve it, Because no age could more deserve it.
The greatness of Swift’s satire is, in the last analysis, a triumph of technique. His arsenal as a satirist is chock-full of weapons of a” descriptions. Wit, raillery, sarcasm, irony, allegory, and so many more weapons are used to perfection by him in his crusade against folly’ injustice, and unreason. Whichever weapon may he be employing or attack, his satire is usually darker and more telling than that of more writers. He may sometimes touch lightly, but very often he pierces deep to the very heart of life.
Eighteenth-Century Prose/ 279
In any case, his satire is very disturbing as it presents things in a fairly unconventional perspective eminently calculated to shatter the complacency of the reader. When Swift points out the acquired follies, he is quite constructive, but when he satirises the very nature of man, he is nothing but destructive.
Of all the satiric techniques the one most effectively used by Swift is irony. With Swift irony is often much more than just a figure of speech; it is extended so that the entire range of thoughts and feelings presented in a satiric work seems to be coming not from Swift himself but from a fktive character (a persona) created for the purpose. The irony lies in the difference between the views expressed by the persona and the common sense views (the same as the views of Swift himself).
Swift wrote a very large number of satires of which the most important are Vie Battle of the Books, A Tale of a Tub, and Gulliver’s Travels. The first is just a yeu d’esprit and was meant to lampoon in mock-heroic terms the opponents of his patron Sir William Temple– particularly Richard Bentley and William Wotton, both of whom had disputed the view of Temple granting supremacy to the ancients over the modems. A Tale of a Tub was meant to be a satire ”on the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning,” It represented the Church of England as the best of all Churches in ”doctrine and discipline,” and also lashed the shallow writers and critics of the age. Gulliver’s Travels is the most famous of Swift’s works. In it he savagely indicted ”that animal called man.” Though it has the externals of a travel romance yet in reality it is a terrible but well-calculated satire on-all the activities of human life and all the attributes of human nature not sparing even the human body. However, its irony is so deep that it has been a favourite gift- book for children. Kipling once said that Swift ”ignited a volcano to light a child to bed.” In fact, the books enjoyed by all children from nine to ninety!
Credit must be given to Swift for the clarity, precision, and what Herbert Davis calls the ”conciseness” of his prose style. Swift despises all unnecessary ornament His imagery, however, is prolific and concrete. At any rate he gives us the impression of an easy mastery of the language. Halliday in the introduction to his Selection from Swift observes:”… the various phases of scorn and satire, of appraisement and direct denunciation, the various moods and tempers of the writer are expressed with wonderful and subtle skill. The secret of his power over his readers is to be sought for here. He makes you responsive to evry nuance of thought and emotion and draws you with the magic of (pipe into whatever region he desires.”
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Addison, Steele,and the Periodical Essay :–
From Swift to Addison is like coming from a real to a paper tiger. Addison perfected the periodical essay which was ”invented” by Steele with the Taller in 1709. Addison collaborared with Steele as Steele did with him in the Spectator which was launched by Addison in 1711 after the latter had been wound up. The periodical paper was extremely suited to the temper and conditions of the eighteenth century; and that explains its immense popularity. The genius of Addison was also quite happy with this new literary genre. He wrote a few more works, but his popularity today is entirely due to his work as a periodical essayist.
The work of Addison and Steele as periodical essayists was actuated by a definite purpose-that of providing instructive amusement to their readers many of whom were women. ”I must confess,” wrote Addison once, ”were I left to myself, I would rather aim at instructing than diverting.” But instruction would not have been welcomed by the readers if it were without some diversion. As ”instructors” Addison and Steele paid special attention to improving the morals and social manners of the people. As champions of good taste and reason they did their best to improve the tone of society. They also popularised ”philosophy.” With his papers on Paradise Lost and the old ballad of Chevy ChaseAddison did a signal service to literary criticism. Steele and Addison were mostly retailers of other men’s opinions; they were not philosophers themselves but they did substantial work to make philosophy a subject of popular appreciation and discussion.
Addison’s prose style is as lucid and precise as Swift’s, but it has much more of polish, refinement, and studied ease. Dr. Johnson calls his style ”the model of the middle style.” And this is his-famous advice : ”Whoever wishes to attain an English style familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” Steele as a man and stylist was less refined and consistent than Addison. He is sometimes patently ungrammatical even. Even then, sometimes his style, in all its spontaneity and attending carelessness, speaks, as it were, from the core of his heart, as Addison’s never even seems to do. ”I like,” said Leigh Hunt, ”Steele with all his faults better than Addison with all his essays.”
Philosophers and Theologians :-
George Berkeley (1685–1753) and David Hume (1711-76) were the great philosophers of the eighteenth century as Hobbes and Locke had been of the seventeenth. Berkeley was an upholder of absolute idealism, and as such, went so far as to deny the very existence of
Eighteenth-Century Prose / 2£ I
matter. His deep religious convictions had the colour of mysticism. As regards the clarity of Berkeley’s prose style, Legouis observes: ”Nothing could be more admirable than the lucid prose, perfectly simple and perfectly elegant, in which Berkeley expressed his profound and subtle views.”
Hume was by far the greatest philosopher of his age. His approach is marked by scepticism and utilitarianism. Regarding his style Legouis says : ”Nothing could be more tranquil and assured than the march of his thought, nothing clearer than the prose in which he pursued his most subtle analyses in lucid and sober language.”
Adam Smith (1723-90) was the father of political economy which Ruskin and his ilk were to attack in the Victorian age. His Wealth of Nations (1776) enjoyed a long and undisputed reign as the Bible of political economists. His style is precise and unadorned to the extent of being altogether sapless.
The first half of the eighteenth century saw the furious raging of the Deistic controversy. The Deists including Charles Blount, John Tolant, Matthew Tindall, Anthony Collins and the Earl of Shaftes.bury believed in what they called ”Natural Religion,” that is, belief in God without corresponding belief in Christianity, or, as a matter of fact,any religion. Swift was one of those who controverted the Deistic heresy.
The rise of Methodism was another theological feature of the century. The two Wesley brothers-John and Charles-were the initiators of the new move towards importing the old enthusiasm, simplicity and sincerity into the religion of the day. John Wesley’s prose is characterised by directness, simplicity, and a rude, compelling force. Dr. Johnson (1709-84) :-
As a prose writer Dr. Johnson is particularly known for his Dictionary, his periodical papers, his philosophical tale Rasselas, and his critical work Lives of the Poets. He was the chain of the realm of letters in his age and an accepted arbiter of taste. As a critic he made many egregious errors, but his infectious sanity cannot be ignored. As a prose stylist he was a purist. However, his style though vigorous and direct is somewhat heavy-handed, and as such is sometimes derisively called ”Johnsonese”, which Chambers’ Dictionary defines as ”Johnsonian style, idiom, diction or an imitation of it-ponderous English, full of antitheses, balanced triads, and words of classical origin.” Goldsmith said jokingly about Johnson’s style that it may fit the mouths of whales but it certainly does not fit the mouths of little fish. Biographers and Letter Writers :-
The eighteenth century produced a number of biographers, autobiographers, and writers of semi-public letters. James Boswell
282 / A History of English Literature
(1740-95), the biographer of his idol Dr. Johnson, has the pride of place among them. His work is as massive as the great Johnson himself ! Life of Johnson is a unique work of its kind. Boswell’s devotion to Dr. Johnson became the cause of his own fame. Among the autobiographers may be mentioned Gibbon, Lord HerVey, and John Wesley.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Cowper, Chesterfield, Gilbert White, Gray, and Horace Walpole were some of the famous letter writers of the eighteenth century.
Periodical Papers and Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) :-
After the Spectator; there was a remarkable proliferation of periodical literature in England. To name all the periodical papers which appeared in the eighteenth century will be an uphill task as their number is legion. Most of them continued the traditions set by Addison and Steele. The name of Oliver Goldsmith is associated with numerous periodical papers. His cosmopolitan attitude, tolerance, delicacy, and sentiment are his hallmarks as an essayist. He expresses himself in a chaste and elegant style free from artificial devices.
Historians :
The eighteenth century saw the establishment of historiography as a respectable and highly developed branch of learned activity. Edward Gibbon (1737–94)–writcr of the mounumental Tlte Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire-was the greatest of the historiographers of the age. His attitude is entirely rational and anti-mystical: His style is dignified and somewhat ponderous, but he can effectively combine harmony and majesty with logic and precision.
Edmund Burke (1729-97) :
Burke was the greatest orator of the age. He dealt with the pressing political problems facing the British Empire. His works concerning Indian and American affairs and the French Revolution are couched in brilliant and rhetorical prose which cannot but impress the most indifferent reader or listener. He was an antitheorist who recommended action in keeping with the spirit and complexion of the times.
REASONS FOR THE POPULARITY OF J THE PERIODICAL ESSAY IN THE / EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Q. 45 Account for the popularity of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century (Punjab 195)
Or
Reasons for the Popularity / 283
Q. Account for the popularity of the Periodical Essay in the
18th Century. (Punjab 1970)
Introduction :-
The periodical essay had its birth and death, in the eighteenth century. It was born with Tlic Taller in the beginning of the century (1709) and breathed its last (about 1800) after remaining in the throes of death in the years following the French Revolution (1789). The reason for its popularity in the eighteenth century is to be sought in the rapport which it had with the genius of the century. What Matthew Arnold describes as ”our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century” added three new literary genres to the fund of English literature. These genres are the mock epic, the novel, and the periodical essay. All of them enjoyed much popularity in the century and the mock epic and the novel, even beyond the termination of the century. However, the periodical essay was the most popular of all, even though it did not extend beyond the century. About the importance and phenomenal popularity of the periodical essay A. R. Humphreys observes: ”If any literary form is the particular creation and the particular mirror of the Augustan age in England it is the periodical essay. TJie Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature lists ninety periodicals founded between Tlte Taller in 1709 and 1720.” The Taller and Tlie Spectator, indeed unleashed a virtual deluge of periodicals which overran eighteenthcentury England. Mrs. Jane H. Jack refers to ”the remarkable proliferation” of this type of essay in the years following the first number of The Taller. Throughout the eighteenth century, and especially the first half of it, the periodical essay was the most popular, if not the dominant, literary form. Men as different as Pope, Swift, Dr. Johnson, and Goldsmith found the periodical essay an eligible medium. As a matter of fact it was,unlike the novel for example, the only literary form which was patronised without exception by all the major writers of the century. It is hard to name a single first-rate, or even second- ratevwriter who did not write something for a periodical paper. In the words of Mrs. Jane H. Jack, ”from the days of Queen Anne- who had The .S/xcfafortakeninwithher breakfast-to the time of the French Revolution and even beyond, periodical essays on the lines laid down by Steele and Addison flooded the country and met the eye in every bookseller’s shop and coffee-house.
Now let us consider briefly the chief causes of the popularity of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century.
Suited the Genius of the People :-
The first and foremost reason of the popularity of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century was its pre-eminent suitability to the genius of the people of that age. The eighteenth century, especially its
284 J A History of English Literature
earlier phase, is known in the social history of England for the rise ol the middle classes. With the unprecedented rise in trade and commerce the English masses were becoming wealthy and many poor people finding themselves in the ranks of respectable burgesses. These nouveatix riches were, naturally enough,desirous of giving themselves an aristocratic touch by appearing to be learned and sophisticated like their traditional social superiors-the landed gentry and nobility. This class of readers had hitherto been neglected by highbrow writers. Literary productions before the eighteenth century were invariably meant for the higher strata of society. Only ”popular literature”, such as the ballad, catered to the lower rungs. Literary works were very often published by raising subscription among the enlightened few, and men ofletters were very often dependent upon their patrons who were rich and influential. There was little literature meant especially for the , middle classes of society. Works like Browne’s Hydriotaphia or even Milton’s Paradise Lost were much above them, and those like ballads and roundelays much below them. These middle classes had now become a force to reckon with. Moreover, in the early eighteenth century, as Bonamy Dobree puts it, the two hitherto well-defined and well-divided groups of readers came to converge into each other. Consequently the writers of the age-like Swift,’ Defoe, Addison, Pope, and Steele-addressed themselves not to a particular group of readers, but all society in general. However, they seem to have been particularly mindful of the middle classes who made up the bulk of readers, and consequently but for whose appreciation and patronage they would have been denied all popularity and success. The periodical essay was particularly suited to the genius of these new patrons of literature. It was the literature of the bourgeoisie, ft gave them what they wanted. It gave them pleasure as well as instruction. The age of parliamentary democracy had then recently dawned and the novel and the periodical essay became the literary embodiments of its spirit.
Not ”Heavy” Literature :-
The periodical essay was a delicate and sensitive synthesis of literature and journalism. It was neither too ”literary” to be comprehended and appreciated by the common people nor too journalistic to meet the fate of ephemeral writings. It could be read, appreciated, and discussed at the tea-table or in the coffee-house. Its lightness and brevity were its two major popularising features. Accounting for the enthusiastic reception of the periodical essay, Mrs. Jane H. Jack observes in The Periodical Essayists” in VoL 4 of The Pelican Guide to
Reasons for the Popularity / 285
English Literature:”… one principal reason for the success of Addison and Steele was the fact that they kept the tastes and requirements of their readers, male and female, constantly in mind. Not the least of the attractions of their new form was its brevity. The seventeenth century had been the century of long books. A seventeenth-century reader seems to have been able to read anything. The only brief forms with any literary pretensions were stiff with ’wit’. The increasing ’reading public’ of the eighteenth century brought a demand for easier reading. It was a time when writers paid more attention to the human frailty of their readers and treated them with greater consideration.” A periodical essay, normally, covered not more than the two sides of a folio half-sheet; quite often it was even shorter.
Suited the Moral Temper of the Age :-
But it was nof mainly owing to its brevity or any other formal feature that the periodical essay became the darling of eighteenthcenlury readers. The main reason lies in ihe fact that it suited their moral temper. The periodical essayists, particularly Steele and Addisontruck a delicate and rational balance between the strait-jacketed morality of the Puritan and the reckless Bohemianism of the Cavalier. The average middle class man, with a hard core of common sense about him was sick of the profligacies and cynicism of the post-Restoration courtiers still surviving in the eighteenth century. Equally was he repelled by the immoderately self-righteous outlook of the pleasurehating Puritans in whose eyes beauty was a snare and all pleasure a sin. The man in the street in the early eighteenth century spurned both the unthinking epicurism of the Cavalier and the rigid asceticism of the Puritan. Some via media, after the demand of common sense and reason, was being sought after. It was for the periodical essayists, particularly Addison and Steele, to effect a synthesis between these two mutually militating views of life. They were to show in their periodical essays that virtue and pleasure were not always incompatible with each other, that pleasure was not always irrational and necessarily irreligious. As A. R. Humphreys points out, ”conventionally the code of pleasure was that of the rake: Steele and Addison wished to equate it with virtue, and virtue with religion.” They strove to emphasize that religion and virtue, far from being incompatible with good breeding, were the most important signs of it. In the words of Taine theirs was ”the difficult task of making morality fashionable But they did not flinch. They not only fulfilled their self-imposed task, but fulfilled it so well that they (especially Addison) became popular idols. As Addison
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put it, the task of Mr. Spectator was ”to temper wit with morality and to enliven morality with wit.” The periodical essayist, then, worked as a popular moral mentor. Bui he was more : he enriched the life of the common man with general knowledge which was then called ”philosophy” and was limited to the closet of the specialized scholar. ”It was,” wrote Addison, ”said of Socrates that he bro ht Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of the closets, and libraries, schools and collcgcs,to dwell in clubs and assemblics.al tea-tables and coffee- houses.” The periodical essay was welcomed by the busy trader and men of affairs because it made accessible to them that knowledge which had till then been considered the monopoly of the chosen few. Appeal to Women :-
The doses of morality, philosophy, and religion administered by the periodical essayists to their readers were fairly dilute, in keeping with their constitution. They, especially Addison and Steele, taught their coarse age the lesson of refinement and elegance. They instinctively felt that women could do a lot in setting the tone of society. But before they were able to do so, women themselves had to learn a lot. They had, for instance, to give up French fopperies, coarse as well as frivolous behaviour, and to cultivate the virtues of domesticity and modesty. Most periodical essayists followed the lead of Addison and Steele in writing many of their essays about and for women. ”It became,” says Mrs. Jane H. Jack, ”an important part of the Tarter and Spectator ’platform’ to stress that the authors were writing for women as well a men and to emphasize that women must play a large part in the civilizing which they were striving to promote. Attention to the interests of the fair sex became one of the invariable conventions of the periodical essay, and there can be little doubt that the essayists did much to improve the status and education of women.” Addison was quite explicit in his intention: ”But there are none to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world.” He meant to offer women ”an innocent if not an improving entertainment,” and urged them not to grudge ”throwing away a quarter of an hour in a day on this paper.” Swift was indignant at Addison’s too frequent treatment of topics of female interest and wrote to Stella in a tantrum: ”Let him fair sex it to the world’s end !” At any rate, by ”fair sexing” it too much Addison and Steele became extremely popular with both the sexes, for they emerged as the first writers in the history of English literature to give adequate importance to specifically female interests.
Reasons for the Popularity/287
Avoidance of Rdlgious and Political Controversies :-
One of the reasons for the general popularity of the periodical essays was that they (with the exception of party organs), shunned religious and political controversies and kept their attention focused only on topics of general interest. Steele and Addison were the writers who with their pose or poise of neutrality set an example for their successors. The eighteenth century was a period of fierce party strife between the Whigs and Tories, and though Steele and Addison were both uncompromising Whigs, yet in their periodical essays at least they maintained a neutral attitude. Mr. Spectator says b the very first issue of The Spectator: ”I never espoused any party with violence, and am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of either side.” When in The Guardian Steele shed his neutral attitude and started espousing the Whig cause, his popularity declined. The Interest in Trade :
We have already referred to the phenomenal rise of the trading community in early eighteenth-century England. One reason why the periodical essay (particularly The Spectator and The Taller) made a special appeal to this community was that it showed a healthy interest in trade. Most of the traders were Whigs and most of the landed gentry and nobility, Tories. The clash between the two parties was not only political but social too. In numerous Spectators Addison ladled glowing praise to the trading community.mucb to their gratification. Up to that time the merchant in literary compositions had served only as an object of satire for his alleged dishonesty, meanness, and calculating nature. But in The Spectator Sir Andrew Freeport was given a place equal to the other respectable men who constituted ”the Club.” The Spectator essay describing the mercantile activity at the Royal Exchange is quite sentimental in the expression of complacency at the tremendous prosperity of the rich merchants.
The Style :-
Most of the periodical essaysists used a simple and conversational style so as to be able to be understood and appreciated by their semi-educated or, at any rate, unscholarly readers. Mrs. Jane H. Jack observes: The periodical writers prided themselves on being ’nearer b our style to that of common talk than any other writers’ (Taller, No.
204) and there can be little doubt that the ubiquity of these essays had a good effect on the prose style of the century as a whole.” The periodical essayist could indulge b individual whimsies, conceits, witticisms, or even ”hard words” only at his peril. Women, who made up
288 / A History of English Literature
a large proportion of the readers, could appreciate such tilings cvc-n less than their male counterparts. The style had to be simple and clear. How disastrous an effect the use of a heavy style could have on the . popularity of a periodical essayist is obvious from the case of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler which never circulated above five-hundred copies. The Spectator, on the other hand, ran to no fewer than five thousand.
,/THE PERIODICAL ESSAY IN THE / EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
/ Q. 46. Write a detailed note on the origin, growth and value of the periodical essay. (Rohilkhand, 1982)
Or
Q. Write a brief essay on one of the following (d) The Periodical Essay
(and four more topics). (Agra 1963)
’ ”’ – Or _ ,: ’’.’,
Q. What is meant by the periodical and social essay ?
Who were Its chief exponents? (Agra 1969)
Or Q. Write a critical note on one of the following :-
(d) The Periodical essay in the eighteenth century, (and four more topics). (Vikram 1961)
Or Q. Write an essay on an any one of the following :-
(e) Periodical Essay of the age of Queen Anne (and four more topics). (Punjab 1967)
Or
Q Trace the origin and growth of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century and give an account of the major essayists of the century. (Agra 1972)
Introduction :
The periodical essay and the novel are the two important gifts of ”our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century” to English literature. The latter was destined to have a long and variegated career over the centuries, but the former was fated to be born with the eighteenth century and to die with it. This shows how it was a true mirror of the age. A. R.Humphrey observes in this connection: ”If any literary form is the particular creation and the particular mirror of the Augustan Age
’”The Periodical Essays / 289
in England, it is the periodical essay.” Generally speaking, it is very difficult to date precisely the appearance of a new literary genre. For example, nobody can say witH perfect certainty as to when the first novel, or the first comedy, or the first short story came to be written in England or elsewhere. We often talk of ”fathers” in literature : for instance, Fielding is called the father of English novel, Chaucer the father of English poetry, and so forth. But that is done, more often than not.in a loose and very imprecise sense. This difficulty in dating a genre, however, does not arise in a few cases-that of the periodical essay included. The periodical essay was literally invented by Steele on April 12,1709, the day he launched his Taller. Before The Taller there had been periodicals and there had been essays, but there had been no periodical essays. The example of The Tatler was followed by a large number of writers of the eighteenth century till its very end, when with the change of sensibility, the periodical essay disappeared along with numerous other accompaniments of the age. Throughout the century there was a deluge of periodical essays. The periodical essay remained the most popular, if not the dominant, literary form. Men as different as Pope, Swift, Dr. Johnson, and Goldsmith found the periodical essay an eligible medium. As a matter of fact it was, unlike the novel for example, the only literary form which was patronised without exception by all the major writers of the century. It is hard to name a single first-rate writer of the century who did not write something for a periodical paper. Mrs. Jane H. Jack says : ”From the days of Queen Anne-who had The Spectator taken in with her breakfast-to the time of the French Revolution and even beyond, periodical essays on the lines laid down by Steele and Addison flooded the country and met the eye in every bookseller’s shop and coffee-house.” Before tracing the history of the periodical essay in the eighteenth century and assigning causes for its phenomenal popularity, let us consider what exactly a periodical essay is.
What is a Periodical Essay ? : –
What is called the periodical essay was first of all given by Steele as The Tatler. Nothing of this type had before him been attempted in England or even elsewhere. However, to attempt a definition of the periodical essay is neither easy nor helpful. George Shcrburn in A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, avers in this connexion : Rigorous definition of this peculiarly eighteenth century type of publication is not very helpfuL.Thc periodical essay has been aptly described as dealing with morals and manners, but it might in fact deal with anything that pleased its author. It covered usually not more
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than the two sides (in two columns) of a folio half-sheet: normally it was shorter than that. It might be published independent of other material, as was The Spectator, except for advertising; or it might be the leading article in a newspaper.”
Reasons for the Popularity :
The periodical essay found a spectacular response in the eighteenth century on account of various reasons. Fundamentally this new genre was in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age. It sensitively combined the tastes of the different classes of readers with the result that it appealed to all-though particularly to the resurgent middle classes. In the eighteenth century there was a phenomenal spurt in literacy, which expanded widely the circle of readers. They welcomed the periodical essay as it was ”light” literature. The brevity of the periodical essay, its common sense approach and its tendency to dilute morality and philosophy for/popular consumption paid rich dividends. To a great extent, the periodical essayist assumed the office of the clergyman and taught the masses the lesson of elegance and refinement, though not of morality of the psalm-singing kind. The periodical paper was particularly welcome as it was not a dry, highbrown, or hoity-toity affair like the professional sermon, in spite of being highly instructive in nature. In most cases the periodical essayist did not ”speak from the clouds” but communicated with the reader with an almost buttonholing familiarity. The avoidance of politics (though not by all the periodical essayists yet by a good many of them) also contributed towards their popularity. Again, the periodical essayists made it a point to cater for the female taste and give due consideration to the female point of view. That, won for them many female readers too. All these factors were responsible for the universal acceptance of the periodical essay in eighteenth-century England: The History of the Periodical Essay The latter” :-
It was Steele’s Taller which began the deluge of the periodical essays which followed. The first issue of The Taller appeared on April
12,1709. At that time Addison, Steele’s bosom friend, was functioning as Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in that country. Steele had not informed Addison of his design, but if he desired to write in secret he was not lucky, a single month detected him, and Addison’s first contribution appeared on May 26. Though Addison contributed to The Taller much less than Steele, yet he soon overshadowed his friend. Of the 271 numbers, 188 are Steele’s and 42 Addison’s; 36 of them were
The Periodical Essays/291
written by both jointly. The rest were penned by others like Tickell and BudgeU. Steele spoke of himself as ”a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid,” and added : ”I was undone by my auxiliary [Addison]: when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without him.” The Taller appeared thrice a week–on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, that is, the days on which the post went to the country. As regards the aim of the paper, we may quote the words of Steele in the dedication to the first collected volume (1710): The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, affectation, and recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse and our behaviour.” All the material of The Taller was purported by Steele to be based upon discussions in the four famous coffee-houses, and was divided as follows:
(i) ”All accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment”- White’s Chocolate-house.
(ii) Poetry-Will’s Coffee-house.
(iii) Learning-the Grecian.
(iv) Foreign and domestic news-St. James’Coffee-house.
(v) ”What else I shall on any other subject offer”-”My own apartment.”
The chief importance of Ttie Taller ties in its social and moral criticism which had a tangibly salubrious effect on the times. Both Addison and Steeie did good work each in his own way. Addison was a much more refined and correct writer than Steele whom Macaulay aptly calls ”a scholar among rakes and a rake among scholars.” Addison’s prof e is, according to Dr. Johnson,a model of ”the middle style.” And this is his famous suggestion: ”Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” Steele,on the contrary, was a thing of moods and moments. His writing has a look of spontaneity and human warmth which Addison’s lacks. Comparing Steele and Addison, George Sherburn maintain;: ”Steele’s prose never attained the elegant ease and correctness of Addison’s, and yet it is probable that his tendency to warm to a subject and to write intimately and personally, as the reader’s friend, contributed much to the success of the paper. Addison’s best essays are the result of his slightly chilly insight into the typical mental attitudes of his day.” Later critics arc apt to place Steele higher than Addison. Thus Leigh Hunt, for instance, affirms that he prefers ”Steele with all his faults” to ”Addison with all his essays.
11
292 /A History of English Literature
The Spectator :-
Without any warning to his readers, Steele suddenly wound up The Taller on January 2,1711. But two months latcr–on March 1,1711- -The Spectator began its memorable career of 555 numbers up to December
6,1712. Whereas The Teller had appeared only three times a week, The Spectator appeared daily, excepting Sundays. The new paper became tremendously popular among English men and women belonging to all walks of life. The best of all the periodical essays, it is an important human document concerning the morals and manners, thoughts and ideas, of the English society of the age of Queen Anne. Addison’s fame chiefly rests on The Spectator papers. As A. R. Humphreys puts it: ”Were it not for his essays, Addison’s literary reputation would be insignificant; into them, diluted and sweetened for popular consumption, went his classical and modern reading, his study of philosophy and natural science, reflections culled froin F;x.nch critics, and indeed anything that might make learning ”polite’. A particularly happy feature of Tlie Spectator was its envisagement of a club consisting of representatives from diverse walks of life. Among them Sir Roger de Coverley, an eccentric but thoroughly lovable Tory baronet, is one of the immortal creations of English literature. The Spectator drew a large female readership as many of the papers were for and about women. Though both Addison and Steele were Whigs, yet in Tlie Spectator they kept up a fairly neutral political poise and, in fact, did their best to expose the error of the political fanaticism of both the Tories and Whigs. Further, Tlie Spectator evinced much interest in trade and, consequently, endeared itself to the up-and-coming trading community which had its representative in The Spectator Club-the rich Sir Andrew Frceport. However, much of the charm of Tlie Spectator lay in its style-humorous, ironical.but elegant and polished. The chief importance of The Spectator for the modern reader lies in its humour. As A. R. Humphrey reminds usjlie Spectator papers are important much more historically than aesthetically. The modern reader, ”if led to expect more than a charming humour and vivacity, is likely to feel cheated.”
The Guardian” and Other Papers before Dr. Johnson :-
The tremendous popularity of The Taller and The Spectator prompted many imitations. Among them may be mentioned Tlie Tory Taller, The Female Taller, Tit for Tatt, and The North Taller. The best of all was Steel’s own Guardian which had a run of 175 numbers, from March 12 to October 1,1713. It was, like’Tlie Spectator, a daily. ”If,” says George Sherburn,”77i« Spectator had not existed, Tlie Guardian
The Periodical Essays / 293
might outrank all periodicals of this kind, but it is shaded by its predecessor, and the fact that Addison– busy with his tragedy Catohad no part in the early numbers certainly diminished its interest.” Another factor which diminished its interest was its open indulgence in political affairs. Apart from Steele and Addison it included contributions from Berkeley and Gay, The Eng/islimen, the successor of The Guardian, was even more politically biased. Steele’s Lover (40 numbers) and Addison’s Freeholder (55 numbers) followed The Englishman. Even to name the works of other periodical essayists would be difficult, so large is their number. ”None of them,” to quote Sherburn, ” approached with any consistency the excellency of these (the periodical papers produced by Steele and Addison).” Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, and Others :-
In the second half of the eighteenth century the periodical essay showed a tendency to cease as an independent publication and to get incorporated into the newspaper as just another feature. The series of about a hundred papers of Dr. Johnson, called The Idler, for example, was contributed to newspaper, The Universal Chronicler, and appeared between April 15,1758 and April 5,1760. These papers are lighter and shorter than those published in the periodical paper The Rambler. The Rambler appeared twice a week, between March 20,1750 and March
14,1752, and ran to 208 numbers. Dr. Johnson as a periodical essayist was much more serious in purpose than Steeie and Addison had been. His lack of humour and unrelieved gravity coupled with his ponderous English make his Rambler papers quite heavy reading. The lack of popularity of The Rambler can easily be ascribed to this very fact.
Among the papers that followed The Rambler may be mentioned Edward Moore’s World (209 numbers) and the novelist Henry Mackenzie’s Mirror and The Lounger. A significant development was the creation of the ”magazine” or what we call ”digest today, it was an anthology of the’interesting material which had already appeared in recent newspapecrs or periodicals The first ’magazine w Edward Cave’s monthly. The Gantleman’s Magazine, founded ia 1731. The vogue of the magazine caught on and many magazines, including The Magazine of Magazines (1750-51), appeared and disappeared. Along with the magazine may be meutioned the initiatiou of the critical review devoted to the criticism of books. The first such periodical was Ralph Griffith’s Monthly Review.
In the end, let us consider the work of Oliver Gokiaiih who from
1767 to 1792 contributed to no fewer than ten periodicals, including The Monthly Review. His own Bee (1759) ran to osty eight wet?
294 / A History of English Literature
numbers. Tt\e Citizen of the World (1762-Goldsmith’s best work-is a collection of essays which originally appeared in The Public Ledger as ”Chinese Letters” (1760-61). Goldsmith’s essays are rich in human details,a quivering sentimentaiism, and candidness of spirit. His prose style is, likewise, quite attractive; he avoids bitterness, coarseness, pedantry, and stiff wit. His style, in the worlds of George Sherburn, ”lacks the boldness of the aristocratic manner, and it escapes the tendency of his generation to follow Johnson into excessive heaviness of diction and balanced formality of sentence structure….It is precisely for this lack of formality and for his graceful and sensitive ease, fluency, and vividness that we value his style.”
}:’ ’\
COMPARISON OF SWIFT AND ADISON AS SATIRISTS Q.47. Compare Swift and Addison as satirists. (Punjab 1957)
Introduction :-
I Swift and Addison are two of the greatest satirists of the age of .satirists, namely, the age of Queen Anne. The whole of Addion’s satiric work is in prose but Swift used verse, along with prose, as medium of his satire, even though his verse satire is considerably inferior to his prose satire. Thus both Addison and Swift, pre-eminently, are prose satirists. Pope is in fact the greatest verse satirist, and Swift the greatest prose satirist, in the entire history of English literature. Addison comes much lower than either of them. Of course, the Victorian critics such as Macaulay and Thackeray placed Addison much higher than Swift who was dismissed by them as a blustering maniac shouting imprecations against humanity. Addison, on the contrary, was praised to the skies as a perfect gentleman writer, mild and understanding, and genuinely and selflcssly concerned with the moral regeneration pf his age. The gigantic, troubling personality of Swift could not, understandably, be fitted into the Victorian critical frame. But, as Bonamy Dobree puts it, the age of ”lachrymosic” praise of , Addison is now gone, and modern criticism, unhampered by sentimentaiism and prejudice, has toppled the Victorian apple-cart and assigned Swift a much higher place than Addison in the hierachy of English satirists. Indeed, as a satirist, Swift is far more searching and complex than Addison, the intellectual content of whose writings is thin like milk-and-water-gruel. Justifiably docs C. S. Lewis complain that there is no ”ironin Addison.
Comparison of Swift and Addison / 295
The Genesis of Their Satire :-
Why did Swift and Addison turn to satire ? In both the cases there were both subjective and objective factors which seem to have operated. All satire is an expression, in one way or another, of its writer’s sense of dissatisfaction with things as they actually are. Satire is the art of expressing creatively the sense of amusement, despair, or disgust-all arising from dissatisfaction at the departure of the real from the ideal. Apathy or contentment can never result in satire. Different things created the sense of dissatisfaction in Swift and Addison and consequently, different things engaged their satiric attention. Addison was dissatisfied with the departure of the people from common sense, reason, and refinement, as was apparent from their manners of dress and behaviour. Women were particularly prone to sartorial extravagances, fopperies and frivolities, mostly imported from France. As a man of culture, Addison was amused to find the state of affairs prevailing around him. He tried his best in The Taller and The Spectator to rid the country of, what may be called, ”minor vices of dress and manners.” His intention, in his own words, was ”to banish vice from the territories of Britain.” This reformative intention found a very eligible weapon in satire. But this satire was bound to be superficial. It was not intended to touch the inner and deep-seated springs of human action. Addison did not go beyond the dress and the skin.
Swift’s satire, on the other hand, could be far more searching disillusioning, and consequently, troubling. Whereas Addison is amused at the difference between what things are and what they should be, Swift is disgusted. Of course, both of them are dissatisfied, but their dissatisfaction takes different shapes. Swift’s objective examination and analysis of the socio-political conditions obtaining around him did much to foment his wrath. Below the pretty-pretty surface of ”the peace of the Augustans” his piercing intellect could see disgusting corruption and unspeakable iniquities. Behind the imposing facade of August an ”common sense and reason” he saw squalid vistas inhabited by monsters of folly and -nor. He had personally been (particularly during 1710-14) a wit: ess to high society and the inner pciitical life of the country, lie had been in touch with political dignitaries such as Harley and Bolingbroke. He had been not oaiy a spectator, but also a player; he had not only seen, but experienced. Moreover, he saw around himself a swarming mass of pedants, idiots, poetasters, witling, shallow dilettantes, ferventxdissesters, pimps, airy scientists, blue Stockings, almanac-makers, and ”corruptors of taste ard lovers of passion.” He, in the words of Herbert Davis, received a ”constant shock, a a moralist, at the insane pride of these miserable vermin [that is, taefi], crawling about the face of the earth…«utraged by the brutalities and iusensitiveness of eighteenth century manners.”
\\- l I’l ;j
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It was natural for such a pestiferous world as Swift saw to have set up a deep and vexatious reaction in his sensitive mind. His rough exterior was,in fact, a mask hiding a hypersensitive nature acutely alive to the deep corruption and perversion of human life. However, along with his objective observation of life his subjective experience was also, to some extent, responsible for provoking his satiric outbursts. Addison’s life was a bed of roses. He was a very successful man who with his rather modest talents rose to high government offices, mostly due to the patronage of numerous grandees. The smugness and sense of complacency and good humour which characterise Addison’s satire are partly due to his own successful ’personal career. Swift’s life was, on die other hand, a veritable jeremiad,.one long concatenation of insufferable woes, ending for the last five years in a state of perfect idiocy. He desired and deserved to be a bishop but could not get beyond being a dean. After 1714, he felt crushed and humbled by the arrival of the era of Whigh supremacy. Thwarted ambitions, neglected merit, physical ill-health, ungratified erotic appetite-he was not married in spite of three love-affairs-the state of servility in childhood and adolescense, everything contributed towards the making of the ”prince of satirists.” The world did not seem to realise his merit, so he wanted to teach it a lesson. He hungered for position though not much for money. He once wrote to Boliugbroke: ”All my endeavours to distinguish myself were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those wLo have an opinion of my parts.”
The Targets of Their Satin :-
The range of Swift’s satiric targets is much vaster than that of Addison’s. Most of Swift’s prose wr«-ks can be called satires. On the other hand, satire is just an element in some of the periodical essays which Addison wrote for The Taller, The Spectator, and some other periodicals. Swift is nothing if not a satirist. His satire knows no barrier. Its rapier-like thrusts spare neither an almanac-maker, nor an airy philosopher, nor a glib politician, nor a conceited fop, nor a pretentious scientist He once satirised even satire ! The paltry Parridge and the mighty Walpdc alike winced under his terrible ”whip of scorpions.” John Bullitt in Swift and the Anatomy of Satin remarks : ”Few satirists have found such a plethora of objects for their contempt as did Swift” Roughly speaking, there are three categories of objects that satirist can attack. They are:
(i) Individuals.
(ii) Groups, tendencies, institutions, professions, ideologies, etc.
(iii) Humanity in general.
Comparison of Swift and Addison / ’.297
Addison restricts his attention as satirist to the second category. His satire is neither too particular nor too general. He attacks neither individual men nor man but, to use his own expression, ”multitudes.” He ridicules the groups of people who patronise numerous follies, fopperies, and frivolities which offend good taste. He lashes the vice but ”spares the man”. He is basically critical not of people but the follies they patronise. It goes to the credit of Addison that as a satirist he never indulged in personalities. There were people like Pope who satirised him quite maliciously and unreasonably, but Addison never retaliated. Wit, according to him; should be employed for educating and reforming humanity rather than deriding one’s personal antagonists.
Swift’s satire, on the other hand, takes within its ambit all the three categories of targets listed above. Starting with individuals and progressing with groups, tendencies, and what he thought were erroneous ways of thinking and behaving, it ends in a terrible indictment of mankind in its entirety and all its attributes. Even the human body and life itself come within the reach of its lashes. While hating humanity Swift made some exceptions. He observes : ”I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities : and all my love is towards individuals… But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them.” If Swift is a misanthrope, he is a misanthrope of his own kind.
A glance at the important satires of Swift will convince one of the tremendous variety of his targets. Generally he makes his satire operate on many planes simultaneously. Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on the pettiness of man, his pride, depravity, and corruption. At the same time there are veiled hits directed against party struggle, silly scientists, mathematicians, etc. A Tale of a Tub, in his own words, was meant to be a satire on ”the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning.” But once again the satire goes beyond its aim and attacks some individuals,particularly ”our great Dryden,” William Wotton, and Richard Bentley as also general human folly and unreason, critics, philosophers, and enthusiasts. The Battle of the Books is a satire on the pride and pettiness of modern writers, particularly Bentley and Wotton. The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit attacks the enthusiasm of the Puritans. Directions to Servants is a delightful satire on wily domestic servant. ”Picket-staff Papers” were written to expose the charlatanry of the almanac-writer Partridge. Drapier’s Letters and A Modest Proposal were written on behalf of the down-trodden Irish petople who were being impoverished and tyrannised by their English overlords. To this list must be added several more works attacking several more
f
298 / A History of English Literature
targets. The extensive variety of his targets may make one question whether it was the world or the great dean himself who was out of step!
Technique :-
All satire is, fundamentally, a triumph of technique. It is the way in which a satirist puts his thoughts which ultimately and exclusively rates his satire. What Swift says in The Battle of the Books, for instance, could have been said simply in a few words. Not that Swift indulges in prolixity: there are very few writers as concise as he is. It is to couch his message in an effective way that he invents the interesting story of the battle of the ancients and the moderns fought ”last Friday” in St. James’s Library. All effective satire eschews directness and works itself through some sly indirection of technique. Both Swift and Addison are good satirists on account of the effectiveness and artistry of their technique. Both are indirect and do not employ the sizzling and denunciatory style of Juvenal. The indirectness of their technique is mostly seen in their very frequent use of irony. According to T. H. Lobban, the two hallmarks of Addison’s satire are ”irony and urbanity”. Pope in the Epistle to Arbuthnot represents Addison as Atticus, whose modus operand: is to
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, leach the rest to sneer.
That is, according to Lobban, ”a brilliant definition of Addisonian irony as viewed by hostile eyes.” Most of Addison’s satiric essays are ironical in tone. He writes about the follies of the age either approvingly or, at least, relates them gravely and simply as if they were quite natural, if not positively admirable. Swift’s usual method is also similar. Dr. Johnson observes: ”One slight lineament of his [Addison’s] character Swift has preserved. It was his practice, when he found any man invincibly wrong, to flatter his opinions by acquiescence and sink him yet deeper into absurdity.” But there is one difference. With Addison, irony, even though it is used very often, is just a momentary instrument to be used and then quickly laid down–sometimes just another figure of speech; with Swift irony is more extensive, almost a way of thinking In many of his satires Swift seems to be wearing an ironic mask from the beginning to the end. He seems to be letting a well-defined fictive character express himself, mostly in obvious contradiction to the views of the writer. That makes for a kind of ”dramatic irony.” He puts thus in action the very folly he intends attacking, and makes it damn itself, without the need of his active intrusion. In A Tale of a Titb, especially in the numerous digressions, it is a hack who is obviously speaking: it is Swift’s intention to satirise hacks. In A Modest Proposal it is an agricultural economist who is made to speak: it is Swift’s intention to
Comparison of Swift and Addison / 299
satirise such people as this character represents. Some of Swift’s masks, for instance that of the Drapicr, are, however, non-ironic. In the hands of Swift such ”extended irony” became a highly refined and effective technique, and has since remained something unique in English literature. Swift, according to Charles Whibley, was ”a great master of irony-the greatest that has ever been born in these isles, great enough to teach a lesson to Voltaire himself and to inspire the author f Jonathan Wild.”
Their General Attitude and the Impression They Leave :-
There is much difference between the general attitudes of Addison and Swift as satirists, and also the impressions that they leave on the reader. Addison is kindly and gentle and generally tolerant; on the other hand, Swift is fierce and indignant and often seems to be out to damn the world. Addison satirises because he loves humanity ; Swift, because he hates it. Saevaindignatio ( = savage anger) is the expression which is often used to characterise Swift’s satire. Addisoa is much more of a ”gentleman” though much less of genius.
Swift shatters complacency as no other satirist does fie urges us to look at things anew and searchingly and not to be satisfied with ”the superficies of things.” Thus, he is much more incisive and compelling than Addison. But sometimes he is gross, and quite often, negative and destructive. Addison was a born optimist believing in basic human goodness and corrigibility. Swift, on the other hand, despaired and hoped by turns, and correspondingly his satire veered between the constructive and the destructive. As long as,” says John Bullitt in the work quoted above, ”Swift could find vices and follies which were not ingrained in man by nature and which could therefore possibly be shamed out of existence, his satire has a place.”
REASONS FOR THE RISE OF THE NOVEL IN j£ THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Q. 43. Account for the rise of novel in the eighteenth century..
(Rohilkhand 1984) Or
Q. What conditions in the literary and social life of England in the eighteenth century helped in the birth of the English novel? (Punjab 1964)
Or
300 / A History of English Literature
Q. Discuss the social and literary conditions which helped in the birth of the English novel in the 18th century.
(Punjab 1970) Or
Q. Account for the unprecedented growth of the English novel in the eighteenth century. (Rohilkhand 1983)
Or
Q. Account for the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. (Agra 1972)
Introduction :-
The most important gifts of the eighteenth century to English literature are the periodical essay and the novel, neither of which had any classical precedent. Both of them were prose forms and eminently suited to the genius of eighteenth-century English men and women. The periodical essayist and the novelist were both exponents of the same sensibility and culture, and worked on the same intellectual, sentimental, and realistic plane, with the oft-avowed aim of instructing the readers and making them lead a more purposeful and virtuous life. Of these two new literary genres the periodical essay was a peculiar product of the environment prevailing at that lime. It was bom with the eighteenth century and died with it after enjoying a career of phenomenal popularity. The novel, on the other hand, survived valiantly the turn of the century and has since then been not only managing to live, but has been growing from strength to strength and adding to its popularity. Even today, when the current of poetry has unhappily run into the arid vistas of cold inteilectualism and clever phrase-mongering and the real drama has become as defunct as the dodo, the novel, which originated in the eighteenth century, is holding up its head as a dominant literary genre.
It was immediately after 1740 that the English novel suddenly arose from the lower forms and came to embody, as no other literary form did, the spirit of the age. The glorious work of Richardson and Fielding was followed by that of the two other major novelists of the eighteenth century, namely, Smollett and Sterne. Soon the whole English literary air was thick with a staggeringly vast number of novels produced by a host of writers. Let us consider the important reasons for the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, as also, by implication, for its spectacular popularity.
T
Reasons for the Rise of the Novel / 301
The Social Environment -.The Rise of the Middle Classes :-
According to David Daiches, the novel” was in a large measure the product of the middle class, appealing to middle-class ideals and sensibilities, a patterning of imagined events set against a clearly realized social background and taking its view of what was significant in human behaviour from agreed public attitudes.” In the words of Oliver Elton, ”it came to express, far better than the poetry could do, the temper of the age and race.” The eighteenth century is known in the social history of England for the rise of the middle classes. With the unprecedented rise in trade and commerce the English masses were becoming increasingly wealthy and many hitherto poor people were finding themselves in the rank of respectable burgesses. These nouveaux riches were, naturally enough, desirous of giving themselves an aristocratic touch by appearing to be learned and sophisticated like their traditional social supcriors-the landed gentry and nobility. This class of readers had hitherto been neglected by highbrow writers. The literary works previous to the eighteenth century were almost invariably meant to be the reading of the higher strata of society. Only ”popular literature,” such as the ballad, catered for the lower rungs. The up-andcoming middle classes of the eighteenth century demanded some new kind of literature which should be in conformity with their temper and be designed as well to voice their aspirations as to cater for their tastes. England was then becoming a country of small and big traders and shopkeepers. And who has more common sense than a trader or a shopkeeper? These people, according to a critic .”took little interest in the exaggerated romances of impossible heroes and the picaresque stories of intrigue and villainy which had interested the upper classes. Some new type of literature was demanded, and this new type must express the new ideal of the eighteenth century, the value and the importance of the individuals life…To tell men, not about knights or kings but about themselves, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles and the results of action upon their own characters,-this was the purpose of our first novelists. The eagerness with which their chapters were read in England, and the rapidity with which their work was copied abroad, show how powerfully the new discovery appealed to the readers everywhere.” Not only was the novel a product of the emphasis on the common man, it also was in rapport with the psyche of the middle classes. According to Cazamian ”there is a deep affinity between the dominant instincts of the middle classes and this branch of literature, the possibilities of which have remained intact. It lends itself better than any other to morality and sentiment.”
Right from Richardson and Fielding to the very modern times the novel has kept up its explicit or implicit purpose of ”teaching” something to the reader. The moral and didactic aim of literature was taken for granted in the eighteenth century. The novel was yet another literary form-like the periodical essay, for example, to teach morality and good conduct to the common people. As regards sentiment, again, most novelists indulged in it. Richardson set the sentimental note so loved of the middle classes, and this note culminated in full orchestration n the highly sentimental novels of Henry Mackenzie (1743-1831). The Democratic Movement :-
The eighteenth century sounded the death-knell of old English feudalism and, conversely, broke down numerous barriers standing between various social classes. With the Glorious Revolution of 1689 started the era of the ascendency of Parliament and the forging of the democratic spirit. This process of democratisation reached a high water-mark in the eighteenth century-the century of the coffee-houses which were helping the process by nurturing and encouraging the spirit of free and frank discussion. Moreover, in the early years of the century, as has been pointed out by Bonamy Dobree in The Literature of the Earfy Eighteenth Century (Oxford History of English Literature),there occurred an increasing amalgamation of the two well-defined classes of readers-the rich and sophisticated class and the common masses. The democratic movement emphasized the importance of the life and activities of the common people. The need was being felt for a new literary form which unlike the romance and tragedy, for instance should hold a mirror to the life of the common people, concern itself with their problems, and tell them how to live or live better. The new form was course, the novel-akind of ”democratic epic.” Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, and their teeming followers dealt chiefly with the life of commoners. The heroine of Richardson’s first novel Pamela is the maidservant of that name. If it was not the first novel in the history of English literature it was at least first to represent sympathetically the ethos and traditions of low and middle classes. As Lord Morley says, it was landmark of a great social no less than a great literary transition, when all England went mad with enthusiasm over the trials, the virtues, and the triumphs of a rustic lady’s maid. Incidentally it may be pointed out that in eighteenth-century drama too the democratic spirit was predominant. In George Lillo’s tragedies-The London Merchant or the History of George Bamwell (1731) and Fatal
Reasons for the Rise of the Novel / 303
Curiosity : A True Tragedy (1736)-for example, the protagonists are not princes or nobles but very ordinary people.
The Ascendency of Realism :-
The eighteenth century was imbued with the spirit of realism, and the literature of the age is, to a great extent, devoid of the enthusiasm, elemental passion, mysterious suggestiveness, and heady imagination which characterised romantic literature. The man of letters in the eighteenth century,whether he was a poet, a periodical essayist, or even a dramatist, believed that for the success of his art a rational appraisal of reality was an essential prerequisite. The novel was another instrument for the exploration and representation of social reality. All the novelists of the eighteenth century-and most of their ”followers” in the subsequent centuries-were stark realists and social critics. David Daiches observes in this connexion: ”Like the medieval fabliau, also a product of the urban imagination, the novel tended to realism and contemporaneity in the sense that it dealt with people living in the social world known to the writer.” Cazamian observes about the novel: ”After, having formerly represented allegorical or ideal visions it tends more and more to become a picture of/life. The middle-class mind would have this picture real, because it has a firm hold upon reality, and cannot break itself away from it. Thus realism will come to find its most favourable fields in the novel.”
The Decline of Drama :-
The decline of drama also contributed to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. Drama in the eighteenth century was no longer a social force as it had been in the age of Elizabeth or even (hat of Charles II. The Licensing Act of 1737, which was meant to curb such scurrilous political satire as Fielding had levelled in his comedies against Sir Robert Wolpole, in the words of If or Evans, ”cut the very heart of drama”. It did not remain an influential literary form. The reading public desired a new form to satisfy its craving for story and social pictures. This craving had its fulfilment with the rise of the novel in the years following 1740.
Much Had Already Been Done :-
We certainly agree with Oliver Elton that after 1740 the English novel ”quickened.” However, we have to bear in mind that the growth of the novel was rot ”sudden” or unrelated to what had already been done by numerous writers. In fact, before Richardson and Fielding started, the soil had already been laid and manured, and even sown. These pioneers of the novel had only to take the last step in the process
304 ’A History of English Literature
.””
of its growth. Moreover the climate of their times was the most suitable for this purpose. Among their immediate predecessors must be mentioned the names of Addison, Steele, Defoe, and Swift. Addison and Steele in the Spectator, papers concerning Sir Roger de Coverley had provided almost a skeleton novel of the social and domestic kind. Some of the Coverley papers read like so many pages from a novel. But it is questionable whether Addison and Steele had the real temperament of the novelist. They seem to have been incapable of any sustained effort and introspective analysis which are the basic requirements for any novelist. However, it can be said to their credit that they did provide some material to work upon for Richardson and Fielding-particularly the latter. Their good-humoured social satire, their lucid style, their basic human sympathy, their intense observation of their environment, and their sense of episode-all were to be the assets of the future novelists. Defoe’s deftness at the art of the narrative, his gift of circumstantial detail, and his unflinching examination of low life had also their admirers among the novelists to come. Defoe himself is not a ”true” novelist as his characters are psychologically too simple and seldom get involved in complex psychological problems. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels had an interesting narrative and some well-attempted verisimilitude-features which were to be the basic requirements of every novel. Thus, in a word, both the material and the method of the novelist were waiting for adoption by a talented writer when Richardson and Fielding appeared on the scene.
The Novel Gave More Freedom to the Writer Than the Drama :-
The rise of the novel was also due to the fact that this new literary form gave more freedom (than, say, the drama) to the writer for the performance of the task which the temper of the age imposed upon him. Without question, the drama imposes many stringent curbs upon the writer. He hif’f has to remain in the background and limit the whole thing within the performing time of about three hours. The novelist, on the other hand, can pretend to omniscience, and can also intrude upon the scene at any time when he finds the need for it Further, there is no cuib on length. Again, in the eighteenth century, with a remarkable spurt in the mass of the reading public which no longer remained confined to London, it became impossible for the theatre to cater for the entire public. Hence the novel came as a welcome substitute of the drama.
The Freedom of the Novel from Classical Restraints :-
As we have said in the beginning, the novel had no classical
The Rise of the Novel / 305
I precedents. In this respect it was quite different from most poetic and i dramatic forms popular in the eighteenth century. For instance, if a , writer had to write an epic, a pastoral, an ode, or an elegy, he had to ! look to the classical models of antiquity and, belong as he did to a : neo – classical age, to respect and follow them. The novel could ignore ;’ authority, for no authority existed. Fielding did, in the intercalary I chapters of his novels, talk rather pedantically about the ancients and I their works,1 but that was just to placate the hostile opinion which an | altogether new literary form was likely to provoke in that age. The novelist had not io follow but set a tradition. Thus whereas poetry, in the words of Cazamian, ”is the slave of an ancient form, which clas-, sicism has carried to a high degree of perfection,” the novel is untrammelled and hence a more eligible medium for such free geniuses as . Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.
THE RISE OF THE NOVEL IN THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
Q.49. Write a brief essay on the English novel in the eighteenth century. (Himachal 1991, Agra 1962)
Or
Q. Give an account of the achievement of the major
novelists of the eighteenth century in England.
(Punjab 1957) Q. Write a critical note on one of the following:-
-, (c) The emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century
(and four more topics). (Vlkram 1961)
(Companion Question) Write a note on the ”Four Wheels
of English Novel.” (Rohilklund 1986)
Introduction :
In the eighteenth century the years after the forties witnessed a wonderful efflorescence of a new literary genre which was soon to establish itself for all times to come as the dominant literary form. Of course, we are referring here to the English novel which was born with Richardson’s Pamela and has been thriving since then. When Matthew Arnold used the epithets ”excellent” and ”indispensable” for the eighteenth century which had little of good poetry or drama to boast of, he was probably paying it due homage for its gift of the novel. The eighteenth century was the age in which the novel was established as
1. He called his novel Joseph Andrews ”a comic epic written in prose!
Q.
Q.
306 I A. History of English Literature
the most outstanding and enduring form of literature. The periodical essay, which was another gift of this century to English literature, was born and died in the century, but the novel was to enjoy an enduring career. It is to the credit of the major eighteenth-century novelists that they freed the novel from the influence and elements of highflown romance and fantasy, and used it to interpret the everyday social and psychological problems of the common man. Thus they introduced realism, democratic spirit, and psychological interest into the novel– the qualities which have since then been recognized as the essential prerequisites of every good novel and which distinguish it from the romance and other impossible stories. Reasons for the Rise and Popularity :-
Various reasons can be adduced for the rise and popularity of the novel in the eighteenth century. The most important of them is that this new literary form suited the genius and temper of the times. The eighteenth century is known in English social history for the rise of the middle classes consequent upon an unprecedented increase in the volume, of trade and commerce. Many people emerged from the limbo of society to occupy a respectable status as wealthy burgesses. The novel, with its realism, its democratic spirit, and its concern with the everyday psychological problems of the common people especially appealed to these nouveaux riches and provided them with respectable reading material. The novel thus appears to have been specially designed both to voice the aspirations of the middle and low classes and to meet their taste. Moreover, it gave the writer much scope for what Cazamian calls ”morality and sentiment”-the two elements which make literature ”popular.” The decline of drama yi the eighteenth century was also partly responsible for the rise and ascendency ot the novel. After the Licensing Act of 1737, the drama lay moribund. The poetry of the age too-except for the brilliant example of Pope’s work-was in a stage of decadence. It was then natural that from the ashes of the drama (and, to some extent, of poetry, too) should rise the phoenix- like shape of a new literary genre.. This new genre was, of course, the novel. Before the Masters :-
Before Richardson and Fielding gave shape to the new form some work had already been done by numerous other writers, which helped the pioneers to some extent. Mention must here be made of Swift, Defoe, Addison, and Steele. Swift in Gulliver’s Travels gave an interesting narrative, and, in spite of the obvious impossibility of the ”action
The Rise of the Novel 307
and incidents, created an effect of verisimilitude which was to be an important characteristic of the novel. The Coverley papers of Addison and Steeie were in themselves a kind of rudimentary novel, and some of them actually read like so many pages from a social and domestic novel Their good-humoured social satire, their eye for the oddities of individuals, their basic human sympathy, their lucid style, and their sense of episode-all were to be aspired after by the future novelists. Defoe with his numerous stories like Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana showed his uncanny gift of the circumstantial detail and racy, gripping narrative combined with an unflinching realism generally concerned with the seamy and sordid aspects of life (commonly, low life). His Scad was to be followed by numerous novelists. Defoe’s limitation lies in the fact that his protagonists are psychologically too simple and that he makes nobody laugh and nobody weep. But his didacticism was to find favour with all the novelists of the eighteenth, and even many of the nineteenth, century. Some call Defoe the first English novelist. But as David Daiches puts it in A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. II, whether Defoe was ”properly” a novelist ”is a matter of definition of terms.” The Masters :-
Between 1740 and 1300 hundreds of novels of all kinds were written. However, the real ”masters” of the novel in the eighteenth century were four-Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The rest of them are extremely inferior to them. Oliver Elton maintains: The work of .the four masters stands high, but the foothills are low.” The case was different in, say, the mid~nineteenth century when so many equally great novelists were at work. Fielding was the greatest of the foursome. Sir Edmund Gosse calls Richardson ”the first great English novelist” and Fielding, ”the greatest of English novelists.” Fielding jnaynot.be the greatest of alL but he was certainly one of the greatest English novelists and the greatest novelist of the eighteenth century.
Samuel RJchardsond689-1761) :-
He was the father of the English novel. He set the vogue of the novel with his Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741). It was in the epistolary manner. It took England by storm. In it Richardson narrated the career of a rustic lady’s maid who guards her honour against the advances of her dissolute master who in the end marries her and is formPamelavmfonawodbyClarissaHarlowe (1747-48), in eight wtfumes. It was, again, of the epistolary kind. Richardson’s thcd and last
308 /A History of English Literature
novel was Sir Gharks Grandison (1754). The hero is a model Christian gentleman very scruplous in his love-affair.
Among Richarson’s good qualities must be mentioned his knowledge of human, particularly female, psychology and his awareness of the emotional problems of common people. He completely, and for good, liberated the novel from the extravagance and lack of realism of romance to concentrate on social reality. The note of morality and sentimentality made him a popular idol not only in England but also abroad. Thus Didoret in France could compare him to Homer and Moses! However, his morality with its twang of smugness and prudery did not go unattacked even in his own age Fielding was the most important of those who reacted against Richardsonian sentimentalism and prudish moralism. One great defect of Richardson’s novels, which is especially noticeable today, is their enormous length. The epistolary technique which he adopted in all his three novels is essentially dilatory and repetitive, and therefore makes for bulkiness. He is at any rate a very good pyschologist and as one he is particularly admirable for, what a critic calls, ”the delineation of the delicate shades of sentiment as they shift and change and the cross-purposes which the troubled mind envisages when in the grip of passion.”
Henry Fielding (1707-54) :-
Fielding in the words of Hudson, ”was a man of very different type. His was a virile, vigorous, and somewhat coarse nature, and his knowledge of life as wide as Richardson’s was narrow, including in particular many aspects of it from which the prim little printer would have recoiled shocked. There was thus a strength ana breadth in his work for which we look in vain in that of his elder contemporary. Richardson’s judgement of Fielding–tbat his writings were ’wretchedly low and dirty1– dearly suggests the fundamental contrast between the two men.” His very first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), wasfotended to be a parody of Pamela, particularly of its priggish morality and lachrymosic sentimentalism. According to Wilbur L. Cross, Richardson ”was a sentimentalist, creating pathetic scenes for their own sake and degrading tears and hysterics into a manner.” In Joseph Andrews Fielding light-heartedly tilted against morbid sentimtntalism and sham morality. After the ninth chapter1 of the book, however, he seems to have outgrown his intial intention of parody. Parson Adams, one of the immortal creatibas-of English fiction, appears and runs away with the rest of the novel. Joseph Andrews was followed by Tom Jones (1749) tad Amelia (1751). We may add to the list of his fictional
The Rise of the Novel/309
wotks Jonathan Wild the Gnat (1743), a cynically ironical novel which, as Lcgouis says, must have been written ’after a fit of gloom.”
Fielding’s novels are characterised by a fresh and realistic moral approach which admits occasionally of animalism and ribaldry, a searching realism, good-humoured social satire, and healthy sentiment. In his abundant and coarse vigour, his common sense and unflinching realism, and his delight in physical beauty (especially female) he is essentially a masculine writer. He does not have the delicacy of Richardson. It may be said that it is hot Richardson who is the ”father” of (he English novel; it is in fact, Fielding. As for Richardson, he is only the ”mother” of the English novel ?
It is to the credit of Fielding that unlike Richarsonandmostofhis ’ own successors, at least in Tom Jones (if not the other novels, too), he provided a glowing model of a well-constructed plot. According to Coleridge, Tom Jones (with oophodcs’ Oedipus the King and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist) is one of the three works in world literature which have perfectly constructed plots. tbbfes Smollett (1721-71) :-
Along with Richardson and Fielding, Smollet is generally included among the masters of eighteenth-century novel; but, as Hudson points out, it must be distinctly understood that his work is on a much lower level than theirs.” His novels are of the picaresque kiad, and include Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and Humphrey Clinker (1771). Smollett was a realist and had his own art of racy narrative and eye-catching description. He was a keen observer of the coarser facts of life, particularly navai life. He exulted m coarseness and brutality. He never bothered about the construction of a plot. Nor did he bother about morality, Richardfonian or ”FieldingUaV His humour, ic keeping with his nature, is coarse rather than subde or ironical and arises mostly out of caricature. Hazlitt observes : ”It is not a very difficult undertaking to class Fielding or Smollett-the one as an observer of the character of human life, the other as a dcscriber of its various eccentricities.” Smollett’s characterisation is necessarily poor. His heroes are mechanical puppets rather than living personalities. They are meant only for the bringing in of new situations. At a critic puts it, ”Roderick Random’s career is such as would be cnoujh to kiO three heroes and yet the fellow fives jest to introduce as to new characters and situations.”
\
310 /A History of English Literature
Laurence Sterne (1713-68) :
His only novel is Tristram Shandy which appeared from 17S9 to
1767 in nine volumes and which is described by Hudson as ”the sti ange work of a very strange man.” If this work can be called a novel, it is one of its own kind, without predecessors and without successors. Hudson observes : ”It is rather a medley of unconnected incidents, scraps of out-of-the-way learning, whimsical fancies, humour, pathos, reflection, impertinence, and indecency.” The plot is of the barest minimum : we have to wait till the third book for the birth of the hero! And he is put into breeches only in the sixth! What a pace of development! It was, says Cross, ”a sad day for English fiction when a writer of genius came to look upon the novel as the repository for the crotchets of a lifetime.”
Sterne’s sentimentalism was to leave a lasting trace on the English novels which followed. What is quite remarkable in Tristram Shandy is the wonderfully living characters of Uncle Toby, the elder Shandy, his wife, and Corporal Trim. ’f
The Novel after Sterne :-
After Tristram Shandy we find in the eighteenth century a remarkable proliferation of novels. But none of the later novelists comes anywhere near Richardson and Fielding. We find the novel developing in many directions. Four major kinds of the novel may be recognized :
(i) The novel of sentiment.
(ii) The so-called Gothic novel.
(iii) The novel of doctrine and didacticism.
(iv) The novel of manners.
Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is prominent among the novels of sentiment. According to Cross, ”written in a style alternating between the whims of Sterne and a winning plaintivecess, [it] enjoys the distinction of being the most sentimental of all English novels.’1 The Gothic novel, which appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century, indulged in morbid sensationalism with impossible stories of supernatural monsters and blood-curdling incidents. Horace Walpole, Mrs. Raddiffe, ”Monk” Lewis, and William Beckford were the most important writers of this kind of novel. The novel of doctrine and didacticism includes such works as Mrs. Inchbald’s Native and Art (17) and William Godwin’s Caleb WMams (1794). These works used die form of the novel just for propagating a specific point of view. The novel of manners was mostly patronised by fairly intelligent female writers such as Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth who aimed at a light transcription of contemporary manners.
Fielding’s Work and Contribution / 311
Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), and Oliver Goldsmith’s 77ie Vicar of Whkefield (1766) also deserve a special mention in an account of eighteenth-century novel. Sarah Fielding’s work was inspired by the success of Pamela. It abounds in faithfully rendered scenes of London life. Dr. Johnson’s work is highly didactic. It emphasized ”the vanity of human wishes” in the form of an allegorical tale which he wrote in a very despondent mood induced by the death of his mother. Goldsmith’s work is, in the words of Cross, ”of all eighteenth-century novels, the one that many readers would the least willingly lose.” This novel is admirable, among other things, for the sensitive characterisation of Dr. Primrose and the general Sanity of the ”philosophy of life” which peeps through it.
FIELDING’S WORK AND CONTRIBUTION
Q. 50. Who are the pioneers of the novel? Discuss briefly the work of one of them (Agra 1952)
work of one of them
Or
Q, Discuss the contribution of Fielding to the development of the English novel. (Punjab I960)
Introduction :-
The eighteenth century-”our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century-is known in the history of English literature particularly for the birth and development of the novel. In this century the novel threw into insignificance all other Ikerary forms and became ihe dominant form to continue as such for hundreds of years. The pioneers of the novel were Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. The work of this foursome is of monumental significance, particularly because they were not only our first novelists but some of our best. No doubt the seeds of the novel were already there in the English literary soil but they burgeoned only with the arrival of these masters. Addison and Stecle (Coverley papers), Defoe, and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) had already provided the raw material for them to work upon. It is debatable whether Defoe be denied the title, of ”the falher of the English novel”, as many of bus stories like Moll Flandem, Roxana, and Robinson Crusoe are very close to being novels, if at all they are considered not to be genuine novels. ”Whether Defoe was”, observes David Daiches rightly, ”properly a novelist is a matter of definition of terms, but however we define our terms we must concede that there is an imports at difference between Defoe’s journalistic deadpan and the
312 /A History of English Literature
bold attempt ~to create a group of people faced with psychological problems.” Defoe was a realist in his own right, but his ”interest in character was minimal.” Critical opinion, therefore, is not inclined to accept Defoe as the first true English novelist or even as one of the pioneers of the novel.
Fielding’s Greatness :
Of the four pioneers of the English novel named above, the first two were considerably superior to the rest. Of the two- Richardson and Fielding-Fielding has been recognized to be the greater. Edmund Gosse in A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1902) characteristically refers to Richardson as ”the first great English novelist” and to Fielding as ”the greatest of English novelists.” Though it stands to reason if Fielding was the greatest of all English novelists, yet two things cannot be denied-first that he was one of the greatest, and secondly that he was -greater than Richardson. Among his contemporaries, no doubt,there raged an interminable debate as to the comparative merits of the two. It is also on record that Richardson enjoyed much the greater popularity and praise in the Continent. Modern critical opinion is; however, in favour of placing Fielding higherconsiderabiy higher-than Richardson in the hierarchy of English novelists. The lachrymosic sentimentalism, prudish morality, and the sprawling epistolary manner Richardson adopted in all his three novels along with his smugness and conspicuous want of the sense of humour and comedy- all go .against him today. Fielding’s lively realism, his sunny humour and satire, his insistent sanity and fundamental tolerance of human frailty, his keen eye for the comic, his racyjiarrative, his gift of plot-construction displayed in Tom Jones if not elsewhere too-all contribute towards his excellence as a novelist. Louis L Bredvoid refers to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding in these words : ”From the first appearance of tneir earliest novels a literary feud has persisted in regard to the relative merits of the hovels of Richardson and Fielding. In personality, artistic method and ethical outlook the two men are as far apart as the poles.” This ”literary feud” has by now been resolved, and the palm has been awarded to Fielding whose work and contribution to the English novel we are now set to examine.
FIELDING’S WORK
Joseph Andrews (1742) :-
It is Fielding’s first novel It is a classical .example of a literary work which started as a parody and ended as an excellent work of ait in its
. ’ Fielding’s Work and Contribution 7313
own right. The work Fielding intended to parody was Richardson’s first novel Pamela,or Virtue Rewarded which had taken England by storm in. .he years following 1740 when it was first published. Richardson’s smug and prudential morality and his niminy-piminy sentimentalism ”were Fielding’s target. Richardson in his novel had shown how a rustic lady’s maid (Pamela) wins a dissolute noble for her husband by her rather calculated and discreet virtue. In his novel Fielding intended in the beginning to show how Lady Boody (aunt of ”Lord B.” in Richardson’s novel) attempts the virginity of Joseph Andrews, described as the virtuous Pamela’s brother but in the end discovered to be different. The whole intention was comic. But after Chapter IX Joseph Andrews seems to break away completely from the original intention. Parson Adams, who has no counterpart in Pamela, runs away with the novel. He, according to Louis I. Bredvold, ”is one of the most living, lovable, comical bundles of wisdom and simplicity in all literature.” In the words of Edmund Gosse/Parson Abraham Adams, alone, would be a contribution to English letters.” He indeed is the hero of the novel, and not Joseph Andrews. Fielding was aware of giving a new literary form with Joseph Andrews which he called ”a comic epic in prose.” ”Jonathan Wild” (1743) :-
Fielding’s next novel was a loose narrative suggested by the notorious gallows-bird Jonathan Wild who was hanged in 1725. It is a deep;cynical’and sarcastic satire on ”greatness” in general and the ”great” Walpole in particular, as also on the many biographers of the age who indulged in exaggerted eulogy of the persons whose lives they handled. It is so different from Fielding’s subsequent works, namely, Tom Jones and Amelia, that Austin Dobson suggests that it must have , been written earlier than Joseph Andrews even though it was published a year later. Throughout the work Fielding keeps up a sustained ironical pose reminiscent of the favourite method of Swift. Walter Allen observes about Jonathan Wild : ”Some pages of Swift apart, it is the grimmest and most brilliant prose satire that we have; and perhaps it is even more effective than Swift’s because it is not the work of a misanthrope.” .
”Tom Jones’(1749) :
Tom Jonas, indeed, is Fielding’s magnum opus. It is, according to Hudson, ”the greatest novel of the eighteenth century. Moody and Lwictt observe: In structure, in richness of characterization, in sanity and wisdom of point of view, Tom Jones stands unrivalled in the history
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of English fiction.” In Tom Jones Fielding has a very vast canvas on which he paints with appreciable authority a representative cross-section of the society of his age. The swarming multiplicity and variety of characters make one feel that here-4s ”God’s plenty”–the same that Dryden found in Cphaacer’s Prologue to his Canterbury Tales. A very remarkable merit of the novel is its excellent structure. Fielding is a master of that architectonic ability which we find so lamentably lacking in the works.of most novelists. In Tom Jones, unlike in Joseph Andrews, Fielding does not pay any attention to Richardson and tries to represent his own view of English manners and morals and life in general. What he particularly excels/in is his sense of comedy in which he, according to Louis I. Bredvold, can be placed beside Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.
”Amelia’(1751) :-
Amelia is the last of Fielding’s novels. In tone and execution it is markedly different from all the rest. It is the pathetic story of a patient and virtuous wife who suffers much and suffer; long. Fielding here works on a much smaller canvas and his vigorous joviality and sense of comedy arc conspicuous by their absence. His fast deteriorating health and the maturity of his years seem, at least partly, to be responsible for this cataclysmic .change. Amelia is the only full-length female character drawn by Fielding. She is described by falter Allen as ”a character whose quiet radiance illuminates and softens a world of viciousness and deceit. Amelia is die rarest of successful characters in literature, the absolutely good person who is credible/ Amelia is a domestic.novel, not ”a comic epic in prose” like Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones.
FIELDING’S CONTRIBUTION
Introduction :
Both in his teefaique and the philosophy of life Fielding set glowing examples for all novelists to follow. Major novelists such as Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and Meredith as well as the minor ones like Fanny Buraey and Maria EdgeworU) accepted his
Fielding’s Work and Contribution /315
influence in varying degrees and ways. Even Lcssing and Goethe paid Fielding some very glowing tributes. The English novel, in various respects, is considerably indebted to him. Fielding might have been less popular with his contemporaries than Richardson, yet on the development of the English novel he exerted a much greater influence.
Realism :-
Fielding was the pioneer of realism in English fiction. Both Richardson and Fielding were, broadly speaking, realists, and both reacted against.the French romance so popula’r in their age, as also the effete taste of their predecessors like Aphra Behn. Fielding also reacted against Richardson’s sentimentalism as a falsifying influence on the Study of reality. Fielding does not reject sentimentalism al~ together-his/f/ni//j is rich in pathos and sentiment. ”His desire”, says Cazamian, ”is to give sentiment its right place; but also to integrate it in an organic series of tendencies where each contributes to maintain a mutual balance.”
Fielding is one of the few writers who, despite_the wideness of their scope,are capable of observing the demands of reality with perpetual eae. He works on a crowded canvas but, as has been said, ”all his characters inhabit the same plane of reality,” His novels hold up to view a representative picture of his age. He is as authentic a chronicler of his day as Chaucer was of the later fourteenth century. Fieldiag’s truth is not the crude and bitter truth of Smollett’s. A. R. Humphreys observes: ”Fielding’s is the higher and more philosophical truth which epitomizes the spirit, the ethos, as well as the body, of the time which deals primarily not in externals but in the nature of man and in an intellectual and moral code.”
Humour, Satireand Sharp Sense of Comedy :
Fielding js one of the greatest humorists in English literature. The same comic spirit which permeates his plays is also evident in his novels. As he informs us, the author upon whom he modelled himself was Cervantes; it is not surprising, therefore, that comedy should be his method. Fielding’s humour is wide in range. It rises from the coarsest farce to the astonishing heights of the subtlest irony. On one side is his zestful description of various fights and, on the other, the grim irony of Jonathan Wild. Higher than both is that ineffable, pleasant, and ironic humour that may be found everywhere in Tom Jones but is at its best in Joseph Andrews where it plays like summer lightning around the figure of Parson Adams-au English cousin of Don Quixote. Fielding’s very definition of the novel as ”a comic epic in prose” is indicative of the place of humour and comedy in his novels and, later, those of many
316 /A History of English Literature
of his followers. It may be pointed our here that Richardson had no sense of humour; he was an unsmiling moralist and sentimentalist. Comparing the two, Coleridge says r’There is a cheerful, sunshiny, breezy spirit that prevails everwhere strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson.” Fielding’s humour is sometimes of the satiric kind, but he is never harsh or excessively cynical as Smollett and Swift usually are.
Healthy Morality and Philosophy of Life :-
No reason proved so compulsive with Fielding in prompting him to parody Richardson’s Pamela as Richardson’s hoity-toity moralism added to a somewhat mawkish sentimentalism. Fielding must have heartily laughed at Pamela’s self-regarding virtue. In his own novels he appealed to motives higher than prudery and commercialism while dealing with matters moral and ethical. He endeavoured to show the dignity of the natural and inherent human values. Thus Fielding preached a morality of his own which, in the words of David Daiches, is ”goodness of heart i ather than technical virtue with sins of the flesh regarded much more lightly than sins against generosity of feeling.” Whether a man is virtuous or not is decided, with Fielding, not by his external and self-regarding conduct but by the presence or absence of inner goodness which generally means generosity of feeling. This” says Cross, ”is a complete repudiation of Richardson, if not of Addison: the point of view has shifted from the objective to the subjective, from doing to being, and the shifting means war against formalism. Virtue is, according to Fielding, its own reward and vice a punishment in itself. In the dedication to Tom Jones he says: ”I have shown that no acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion io innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety,which in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms.” Even when Fielding insisted that nothing in Tom Jones ”can offend even the chastest eye on perusal,’ he was charged by many with grossness and ribaldry. ”Richardson” says Edmund Gosse, ”bitterly resented all this rude intrusion into his moral garden, and never ceased to regard Fielding with open aversion.” Richardson was really mortified, but, in the words of Oliver Elton, he only ”shook his throat like a respectable turkey-cock.” Plot-construction :
Fielding was nor only a great novelist but a great master of ptatcoostnicdon also. From Chaucer down to the modem times Eugfish writers have mostly ignored the archUectcMik part of thesr compositions. Fkldingeame to the novel from the dnuna, and though his play
fi
Fielding’s work and Contribution/317
are ill-constructed, yet his experience as a dramatist served him in good stead. Tom Jones is, according to Elizabeth Jenkins, an ”amazing tour deforce of plot-construction.” Coleridge placed it amongthe three best constructed masterpieces of world literature-the other twoljeing Sophode’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Ben Jonsoifs The Alchemist. Fielding defined the novel as ”a comic epic in prose.” But,as Oliver Elton points out, in Fielding’s novels there is more of the dramatic than epic quality. The last scenes of his novels, particularly, resemble the last scenes of a well-knit comedy, such as one by Ben Jonson. ”Fielding was,” according to Hudson, ”much concerned about the structural principles of prose fiction, a matter to which neither Defoe nor Richardson had given much attention. To him the novel was quite as much a form of art as the epic or the drama. Unfortunately, Fielding’s successors did not learn much from his example, and offended in respect of plot-construction as his predecessors-Defoe and Richardson-had done before him.
Characterisation :-
Fielding is a great master of the art of characterisation also. His characters are very Ufelike-excepting a few caricatures like Beau Diddaper. They are not only individuals but also representative figures. He himself remarks: ”I describe not men but manners, not an individual but the’ species.” His broad sweep as a inaster of character is quite remarkable. A critic avers: ”Since Chaucer was alive and hale, no such company of pilgrims-poachers, Molly Seagrims, adventurers and Parson Supples-had appeared on the English roads.” Fielding’s broad human sympathy coupled with his keen observation of even the faintest element of hypocrisy in a person is his basic asset as a master of characterisation. He laughs and makes us laugh at many of his characters, but he is never cynical or misanthropic. He is a RSsant satirist, sans malice, sans harshness. He gives no evidence of being angry at the foibles of his characters or of holding a lash in readiness. His comic creations resemble those of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Parson Trulliber and Falstaff, if they were to meet, would have immediately recognised each other!
DR. JOHNSON AS A CRITIC
Q. 51. Evaluate Dr. Johnson as » critic of literature.
(Punjab Sept 19S6)
318/A History of English Literature
(Companion Question). Write a note on Dr johnson as an arbiter of taste. (Agra 1963)
Introduction :
”Johnson’s critical writings are living litctattne as Dryden’s for instance, are not. Johnson’s criticism, most of itbelongs with the living classics; it can be read afresh every year with uaffected pleasure and n«w stimulus. It is alive and life- giving”.
–Dr. Lcaiis in Scrutiny, Vol. XII.
Dr. Johnson was the grand chant of the icilm of letters of his day. A critic observes: There are four great dictatorial figures in, English literature, each of whom seems to have been itccgnised in his age as the. supreme authority in the realm of letters, la the time of James I there was Ben Jonscn reigning at the Meriaid Tavern; after the Restoration came Dryden Jo give his views inlhe coffee-house, then followed Pope; and after him arose Dr. Johmoito utte-r his downright judgments in tavern and drawing-room and took-shops, and at fee Literary Club.” As is clear from BoswelS’s inimilable biography (Life of Johnson}, Dr. Johnson was particularly good i purposeful and witty conversation. Indeed the last thirty years of his lie he spent talking and by talking, overwhelming his friends and fas alike. He gathered around himself a galaxy of the most importaii! literary figures of the age The Club was organised in 1764 and from lien till his death in 1784 Dr. Johnson completely dominated it. Moody ad Loved maintain that Johnson’s so-called dictatorship of English letters was largely the result of his conversational supremacy in the Literal? Club which included nearly all the famous writers of the time. Among these ”famous writers’ were Sir Joshua Reynold the famous painter, Girrick the actor, Malone the Shakespearean scholar Bishop Percy tfe collector of ballads, Adam Smith the political economist, Gibbon the historian, Boswell, Fox; Burke the orator, and Oliver Goldsmith. They met,” Bosweli tells us, ”at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard street, Sob, one evening iu every week at seven, and generally continued their conversation tin a pretty late hour.” Dr.. Johnson was the soul of his leaned assembly and acted visibly as the dictator thereof.
His Equipment as a Critic :
As critic of literature Dr. Johnson was well equipped. About his classical reading there cannot be any doubt He had an’amazingly retentive memory and could eke passage after passage from English and classical poetry without having to lock at tie text He had tremendous mental vigour as well as clarity of perception. His acuteness of
Dr. Johnson as a Critic / 319
observation was combined with a wonderful candour of judgment and expression. Of all the English critics Johnson is the last to mince matters. He is very forthright, even downright. He has some central points of view which he defends with all his bullish strength. Last but not least is his delightful style.
But he has many limitations too. He is a man of very strong likes and dislikes-the dislikes being much stronger than the likes. He has pet prejudices which impair some of his criticism. Many have questioned his ear, and some .have attacked his dogmatism and his incapacity to appreciate what is, dubiously, called ”pure poetry.”
”Preface to Shakespeare” :-
The two important works of Jonson as a critic are :–
(i) Preface to Shakespeare ; and
(ii) Lives of the Poets.
Let us consider the first of the two and see what idea of Johnson as a critic it gives.
Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare appended to his edition of Shakespeare is, in the words of David Daiches, ”one of the noblest monuments of English neoclassic criticism…and an exposure of some of the weaknesses, contradictions, and unnecessary rigidities of some widely accepted neoclassic principles-Its pungent style, emphatic clarity, and tendency to epigrammatic summing up of each argument, carried its ideas home with enormous force.” No modern editor of Shakespeare can ignore what Johnson has to say about Shakespeare– his comments on characters, his quite illuminating notes on the meanings of words,and his general assessment of Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist. The Preface represents effectively all the good and bad qualities of Johnson as a critic. It is, according to a critic, ”certainly the most masterly piece of literary criticism. All Johnson’s gifts are seen at their best in it: the lucidity, the virile energy, the individuality of his style, the unique power of first placing himself on the level of the plain man and then lifting the plain man to his, the resolute insistence on life and reason, not learning or ingenuity, as the standard by which books are to be judged.”
Johnson neglects the merits of other Elizabethans and pays this glowing tribute to Shakespeare : The stream of time which is continually washing dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare. Poetic reputations blaze up and dwindle and the fire which heartened one generation will be but cold ashes to the next. Yet for three centuries Shakespeare’s fame has
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glowed so steadily that he has come to be looked on as the supreme expression not only of the English race but of the whole world.” The basis of Johnson’s exaltation of Shakespeare is essentially neoclassic. He does not passively accept the decision of generation after generation. According to him ”nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature”. This is the neoclassic expression of Aristotle’s conception of imitation. Shakespeare is great because he is a poet not of freaks and whims but of general human nature which ”is still the same.” Shakespeare’s ”persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion.” The emphasis on general truths rather than on the investigation of details is a basic tenet of the neoclassic’school. ”To generalise is to be an idiot,” said Blake; but the neoclassicists did not count the streaks of
a tulip.
Johnson is, however, not a strait-jacketed neoclassicist. He admits of an occasional departure even from his pet principles. As he puts it, ”there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.” The imitation of general nature which he insists on should, in his opinion, be subjected to moral and didactic considerations. The end of writing,” Johnson says, ”is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.” And this is Shakespeare’s ”fault”: ”He sacrificed virtue to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to write without any moral purpose.” Thus, one of the reasons we praise Shakespeare for is treated by Johnson as his ”defect.” ”This also explains Johnson’s plea for poetic justice. He supports the happy ending of King Lear as manoeuvred by Nahum Tate and others. He admits that a play in which the virtuous suffer and,the wicked prosper ”is a just representation of the common events of human life.” But even then the playwright should preferably show ”the final triumph of persecuted virtue,” as that will please the audiences more.
Johnson does not show evidence of any real grasp of Shakespeare’s poetic powers. He feels that Shakespeare was better at comedy than tragedy. Nor is he aware of the psychological subtleties of his characterisation. His criticism of Shakespeare’s verbal quibbling is also indicative of his deficiency of perception. Shakespeare’s puns, truly speaking, are not always senseless. When Margaret in Richard III
says:
And turns the sun to shade; alas! alas!
Witness my son, now in the shade of death,
she is not just playing on the words ”sun ”son,” and ”shade.” She is i» fact fulfilling a deeply compulsive psychological necessity. Her
I
Dr. Johnson as a Critic/ 321
wordplay is, in the words of Oliver Elton, in the nature ofasafoy valve, with a grim load of hiss id it, for the escape of passion. T«« Uvc of tfce Poets” :-
Johnson’s most mature and sustained critical work is The Lives of thePbetsorijfatOy pbSabedurKStBioraphicaiandCfilitu itfttf HMsofAe English Poets, between 1779 and 1781. It ’was intended to be a series of introductions to the works of the English poets from Cowiey and Milton down to Johnson’s contemporaries like Akenside and Gray. As many as fifty-two poets are dealt with. It is characteristic of the work that it deals with only the poets of the neoclassical tradition. As David Daiches says, Tor the most part Johnson is dealing with men writing in a tradition he understood and employing the kind of verse for which he bad an extremely accurate ear. Many of the poets dealt with are read by nobody nowadays-Thomas Yalden, Edmund Smith, William King, James Hammond, and GUlbert West. Only six of the rest-Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Coffins, and Gray-are of real significance today.
In ’each of the Lives’ Johnson gives the biographical facts about the poet, his observations on his character, and then a critical assessment of his poetry. Except in the case of the minor poets he makes little contribution to biographical facts. Anyway, his style is attractive throughout We may not accept The Lives a/the Poets as a guide, bat, certainly, it is a good companion. Johnson’s criticism is of the ”judkiaT kind. He passes a clear verdict on every poet. He defined, in his Dictionary, a critic as ”a man skilled in the art of judging literature; a man able to distinguish the faujts and beauties of writing.” Obviously, the embhasis is on judgment and discrimination. His method and conception of the function of a critic were later to be opposed by the poets and critics of the romantic school, who put emphasis not on judicial verdict but on the ”imaginative interpretation of literature.
Dr. Johnson’s premises as a critic in this work are as essentially neoclassic as in his criticism of Shakespeare. Again, his insistence on the function of poetry–”to instruct by pleasing”– is ubiquitous. All poetry is the work of genius, and genius is ”that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates.” Invention, imagination, and judgement are included in genius. What is a poet, according to Johnson ? The answer as interpreted by David Daiches.is as follows: The poet is a man seeking to give pleasure by conveying general truths about experience with freshness and skill, the questbns to be asked of a given poet are: what kind
322 / A History of English Literaturi
ofainan.UvinginwJutageandciratatt sort of a man, with what degree of»cces did he produce works capable of giving pleasure by their tart »ndliveliness ?” The emphasis is again on ”just representations of getfd nature.” Any departure from this basic neodascic prerequisite is Wfy opposed by Dr. Johnson. OfcouisomestixMigpenoaiJprejiiiwaMPhffi criticisms. Thus Milton is partly attacked on political grounds : ”Milton’s republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hajtred of greatness, and sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of control, and prjfe dudainftl of superiority.’ Johnson’s contempt for Milton’s sonnets-is due to hisdislike of the sonnet as a poetic form. He is harsh to Swift as he somewhat suspects his religious sincerity. Such instances of prejudiced views can easily be multiplied. We certainly agree with George Shcfburn that Johnson’s ”errors are gross, open and palpable.”
However, most of Johnson’s adverse opinions spring not from his literary and non-literary prejudices but his central point of view regarding the purpose and function of literature. This point of view is built ,4nainly on the neoclassical premises, though with some very vital dift, ferences. lake, for instance, his condemnation of Cowley and the entire a line of metaphysical poets. His views are in strict accordance with the spirit of his age. The chief fault of the metaphysicals, in the eyes of Johnson, is their sacrifice of the general for the particular and their excessive love of heavy learning. He observes: The fault of Cowley,
Mwi n»rka.»« all »V ’. TT° _l :. »1 t -£ I
his thoughts to their last ramification, by which he loses the grandeur of generality This is what he has to say about metaphysical wit: The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises…”
Dr. Johnson has been frequently pilloried for his condemnation of Milton’s Lyddoj. His condemnation iw not, however, the unthinking stricture of a fanatic, but a natural product of his fundamental attitude. The poet, as we have already pointed out, must, according to Johnson, give representations of general native with,to use Daiches’ words again, ”truth” and ”liveliness” (that is; novelty). He should maintain a delicate balance between the two If tie adheres to truth too strictly at the cost of liveliness, the odds are that his ”representation” will become mechanical as he will usually employ highly traditional diction, idiom, and imagery. On the contrary, if he strives too much for novelty, it is likely that he will depart considerably from truth and get bogged down in his own whimsies. The first is the fault of Milton (in Lycidas) and I. He does not include Mmve,lamonghjs port, rt
Dr. Johnson as a critic / 323
die second that of the metaphysical. Both are faults, bat the latter is somewhat less serious than the former. David Daiches observes that ”in the last analysis, Johnson held that exhibitionist novelty was better than the mechanical repetition of hereditary similes.” In condemning Lycidas, Johnson still shows his sense of the beautiful poetry which Milton has been able to create even with his ”schoolboy” similes and images.
This deficiency in appreciating, the strictly aesthetic merits of poetry leads Johnson to unfair criticism of Gray and Collins who are often called .the precursors of Rcfraantidsm. His disapproval of Gray is not really due to his disapproval of all romantic tendencies, but due to his disapproval of all artificial and extravagant language, the same for which he takes Lycidas to task. Basically, Johnson was against the use of classical mythology in modern English poetry. He maintained a vigorous independence from most neoclassical dogmas. His leniency about the three dramatic unities and his disregard of the rigid conception of ”kinds” and the rules of decorum are instances in point Further we must remember that he made important concessions. He helped Percy overhe Reliques; he appreciated//Penseroso and GrongarHill; he praised the Castle of Indolence} and he got over his dislike of blank verse while dealing with Milton, Thomson, and Akcnside, His objection against blank verse was not that it was not good bet that good blank verse was seldom written. His aesthetic capacity might be questioned but not his liberalism as a critic. He was not at all deaf to the newer and richer poetry which had begun to be written in his age. However, he is at his best when dealing with the-poets who write that kind of poetry with which he is effortlessly in rapport His criticism of Dryden and Pope is really remarkable. The famous passage in which he compares the two poets, in the words of David Daiches, ”has had a permanent effect on the history of the reputation of those two poets…” The business of criticism, in Johnson’s own words, is to free literary judgement from ”the anarchy of ignorance, the caprices of fancy and the tyranny of prescription, and to assign values on rational grounds.” In his practice, Johnson was true to this conception. He may be charged with neoclassic bias; but M. H. Abrams meets this Charge well: ”If Johnson read Milton and Donne through the spectacle’, of Pope, Wordsworth and Coleridge read Pope through the spectacles of MUton, while more recent critics have read Wordsworth and Coleridge and Milton through the spectacles of Donne.” It may be more difficult to absolve Johnson of his prejudices, but the normal sanity of his judgment, his abundant gusto, and pointed expression cannot be overlooked. Hecan yet delight, if not guide,us.
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304 / A Hktory off English Literature
THE PRECURSORS OF THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL / OR THE TRANSITIONAL POETS
Q.52. Write a note on the precursors of the Romantic Revival
(Rohilkhaod 1993) Or
Q. Write a note on the precursors of Romantic Revival, with special reference to Gray and Collins.
(Vila-am 1966) Or
Q. To what extent did Cowper, Collins and Gray anticipate the nineteenth century ’Romantics’.
(Punjab Sept 1956) Or
Q. To what extent did Thomson, Cowper, Gray and Collins anticipate the 19th century Romantics?
(Punjab 1965) Or
Q. ”The eighteenth century was an age of reason but the channels of Romanticism were never dry.” Discuss.
(Punjab 1962)
Or
Q. Trace the revival of Romanticism in the poetry of the later eighteenth century. (Rohilkhand 1978)
IntrotoctioB ;-
The eighteenth century is usually known as the century of ’prose and reason, the age in which neodassidsm reigned supreme and in which all romantic tendencies laJTdonnant, if not extinct. But that is a verdict too sweeping to be true. Irithiscentury-especially the later part of it-we can see numerous cracks in the classical edifice through which seems to be peeping the multicoloured light of romanticism. In the
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later yean of this century a large number of new influences were at work on English sensibility and temper. The change signalized a change in the ethos of poetry and, in fact, literature as a whole. The younger poets started breaking away from the ”school of Dryden and Pope, even though some poets, like Churchill and Dr. Johnson, «J» elected to remain in the old groove/Fhere were very few poets, indeed, . .t. 1–.-i-»-K,i«..’frMntiinM traditional influences.
who set
The Transitional Poets / 325
Most of them are, as it were, like Mr. Fadng-bothways, looking sunul taneously at the neoclassical past and die romantic future. They seem to be
. Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state.
In the selection of subjects for poetic trcament, in the choice of verse patterns, and in the manner of treatment we meet with perceptible changes from the conventions of the Fopean school. Those eighteenthcentury poets who show some elements associated with romanticism, while not altogether ignoring the old conventions, are called transitional poets or the precursors of the Romantic Revival.
Let us sum up the romantic qualities of the poetry of these transi tional poets.
(t) These poets believe in what Victor Hugo describes as liberalism in. literature. Not much worried about rules and conventions, they believe in individual poetic inspiration.
(ii) Their poetry is not altogether intellectual in content and treatment Passion, emotion, and the imagination are valued by them above the cold light of intellectuality. They naturally return to the lyric.
(in) They have, to quote Hudson, ”a love of the wild, fantastic, abnormal, and supernatural
(iv) They show a new appreciation of the world of Nature which the neoclassical poetry hadmostiy neglected. Their poetry’is no longer ”drawing-room poetry. They do not limit their attention to urban life and manners only, as Pope almost always did.
(v) They place more importance on the individual than on society. In them, therefore, is to be seen at work a stronger democratic spirit, a greater concern for the oppressed and the poor, and a greater emphasis on individualism in poetry, in society, everywhere. Their poetry becomes much more subjective.
(vi) They show a much greater interest in the Middle Ages which Dryden and Pope had neglected on account on their alleged barbarousness. Dryden and Pope admired the Renaissance much more and had many a spiritual link with it.
(vii) Lastly, there is a strong reaction against the heroic couplet as the only eligible verse unit They make experiments with new measures and stanzatc forms. It is said that every hero ends as a bore. The same was Unerase with the heroic couplet.
While exhibiting all these above-listed tendencies in their poetic works, the transitional poets are not, however, altogether free from Popean influences. That is exactly why they are not foil-fledged romantics but only ”transitional” poets. Nevertheless, their work proves: The eighteenth century was an age of reason but the channels of Romanticism were never dry.”
326 /A Hifctory of English Literature
Let us now consider the work of the most important of the transitioaal poets of the eighteenth century.
Jtam ”Raman (1790-48) t-
He is a typkal transitional poet, though be chronologically belongs to the first half of the eighteenth century. Though be was contemporaneous with Pope yet he broke away from tue traditions of his school to explore ”fresh woods and pastures new. He bade good-bye to the heroic couplet and .expressed himself in other versemeasures–blank verse and the Spenserian stanza. He would have acknowledged Spenser and Milton as his guides rather than Dryden and Pope. His Seasons (1726-30) is important for accurate and sympathetic descriptions of natural scenes. It is. entirely different from such poems as Pope’s Windsor Forest on account of the poet’s first-hand knowledge of what he is describing and his intimate rapport with it The poem is in blank verse written obviously after the manner of Milton, but sometimes it seems to be over-strained, ”always labouring uphill,” in the words of Hazlitt Thomson’s Liberty is a very long poem. In it Liberty herself is made to narrate her chequered career through the ages in Greece, Rome, and England. The theme is dull and abstract, the narration uninteresting, and the blank verse ponderous. His Castle of Indolence (1748) is in Spenserian stanzas, and ft captures much of the luxuriant, imaginative colour of the Elizabethan poet As a critic puts it, for languid suggestneness, in dulcet and harmonious versification, and ”for subtly woven vowel music it need not shirk comparison with the best of Spenser himself.’ Thomson looks forward to the romantics in his interest in nature, in treating of hew subjects, his strong imagination, and his giving up of the heroic couplet But he is capable of some very egregious examples of poetic diction. Even Dr. Johnson was constrained to observe: ”His diction is in the highest degree florid and luxuriant It is too exuberant and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.” Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) :-
Goldsmith was as friendly with Dr.Johnson as Thomson had been with Pope, but that did not curb the individual genius of either. Goldsmith was as essentially a conservative in literary theory as Dr.Johnson of whose ”Club” he was an eminent member. Both of his important poems, The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770) are in heroic couplets. The first poem is didactic(after Johnson’s usual practice) and is concerned with the description and criticism of the places and people in Europe which Goldsmith had visited as a tramp. The second poem is rich in natural descriptions and is vibrant with a
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The Transitional Poets 1327
peculiar note of sentiment and melancholy which foreshadows nineteenth-century romantics. As in the first poem, Goldsmith exhibits the tenderness of his feelings for poor villagers.
Thomas Percy (1728.1811) :-
Percy is known in the history of English literature not for original poetry but for his compilation of ballads, sonnets, historical songs, and metrical romances which he published in 1765 under the title ReKques of Ancient English Poetry. The .work did a lot to revive public interest in that land of poetry which had gone out of vogue in the age of Dryden and Pope. The book contained poetry from different ages-from the Middle Ages to the reign of Charles. The work had a tremendous and lasting popularity. About its influence on the poets who were to come, we may quote Wordsworth : ”I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques.” Even Dr. Johnson favoured Percy’s venture and earned his thanks by lending him a hand in the compilation.
Thomas Chattel-ton (1752-70) .:-
Chatterton is referred to by Wordsworth in his poem Resolution and Independence as ’
The marvellous boy The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.
Chatterton, indeed, was a ”marvellous boy” who shot into fame, and then, before he was eighteen, poisoned himself with arsenic getting tick of his poverty. Some of his poems, are quite Augustan in their iptatter and from but the most characteristic poems are the ones he published as the work of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk who lived in Bristol, Chattertoo’s native place. Chatterton gaw. out that he had discovered them in a box lying in a Bristol church. i Js hoax was soon seen through, but that does not detract from the merit of the Rowley poems. The poems like Aetta and the Ballad of Charity are, according to Hudson, quite remarkable for two rcasons-”bccause they are probably the most wonderful things ever written by a boy of Chatterton’s age, and because they are another clear indication of the fast growing curiosity of critics and the public regarding everything belonging to the middle ages.” Chattertotn’s woff considerably influenced the romantic poets-who were intensely iaterest«Jin everything medieval.
328 /A History of English Literature
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Janes MacphersM (1736-96) :
He was another forgerer like Cnatterton, though his work was not akogedierbasekss.He«achkifantewithAgmenre/y4nd«tf fotoy Collected in the Highlands cf Scotland and TlmsUud framOu Gaelic or Erse Language which were given out to be ’genuine remains of ancient Scottish poetry Later he producecfftgot m Epic Poem in tixbooks (1762), and then Tcmora, an Epic Poem in eigfti books (1763). Macpherson asserted that these two poems were the genuine work of a Gaelic bard of the third century, named Ossian and that he had given their literal translation in prose. His .claims -provoked an acrimonious controversy as .to their genuineness. ”Fortunately,” says Hudson, ”we need not enter into the discussion in order to appreciate the epoch-making character of Macpherson’s work. In the loosely rhythmical prose which he adopted for his so-called translations he
carried to an extreme the formal reaction of the time against the classic couplet. In matter and spirit he is wildly romantic.” His poems transport the reader to a new world of heroism and supernaturalism tinged with melancholy, a world which is altogether different from the spruce and reasonable world of Pope.
Thomas Gray (1710-71) :-
Gray was tone of the most learned men of the Europe of his day. He was also a genuine poet but his poetic production is lamenfrly small-just a few odes, some miscellaneous poems, and the £bgv. He ftafA hi rwfft M a stTfrfr-jaffrcted fjwpft fvl c”ded as gt’i’nf romantic. His work, according to Hudson, is ”a kind of epitome of the changes which were coming over the literature of his time.” His first attempts, The Alliance of Education and Government and the ode On a Distant Prospect ofEtonCoOege were classical in spirit, and the first mentioned, even m its use of the heroic couplet Eitgy Mitten in a Country ChuchyardiGtsft finest poem which earned him the praise of even Johnson who condcimnrd most of Gray’s poetry. Hudson observes about this poem: There is, first, the use of nature, which though employed only as a background, is still handled with fidelity and sympathy. There is, next, the churchyard scene, the twilight atmosphere, and the brooding melancholy of the poem, which at once connect H…with one side of the romantic movement-the development of the distinctive romantic mood. The contrast drawn between the country and the town-die peasant’s simple life and the madding crowd’s ignoble strife’-is a third particular wlikh will be noted. Finally, in the tender feeling shown for the rude forefathers of the hamlef and the sense of the human value 6f the little things that are written 4in the
The Transitional Poets / 329
short aad ample annals of the poor’, we see poetry, under the influence of the spreading democratic spirit reaching out to include humble . aspects of Hfe hitherto ignored Gray’s next poems, The Progress of Potty and The Bird, present a new conception of the ’poet not as a clever versifier but a genuinely inspired and prophetic genius. His last poems like The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin are romantic fragments with which we step out of the eighteenth century and find ourselves in the full stream of romanticism.
WHu» Coffin (1721-59) :-
Collins’ work is as thin in bulk as GrayV-h does not extend to much more than 1500 lines. He combines in himself the neoclassic and romantic elements, though he is not without a specific manner which is all his own. On the one hand, he provides numerous examples of poetic diction at its worst, and,on the other, he delights in the highly romantic world of shadows and the supernatural His Ode on ’the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands foreshadows the world in which Coleridge delighted. He is chiefly known for his odes. To Liberty and the one mentioned above are the lengthiest of Collins odes, but he is at his best in shorter flights. He is exquisite when he eschews poetic diction without losing his delightful singing quality. Referring to Collins, Swinburne m«t«aaii»« that in ’purity of music” and ”clarity of style” there is ”no parallel in English verse from the death of Marvell to the birth of William Blake.”
WUIlwnCowptt-(1731-1800) :-
”He”, says Compton-Rickett, ”is a blend of the old and the new, with much of the form o the old and something of the spirit of the new.” In his satires he imitated the manner of Pope, but his greatest poem The Task is all has own. It is written in blank verse and contains, the famous line:
God made the country and men made the town Which indicates his love of Nature and simplicity. However, the classical element in him is more predominant than the romantic. Compton-Rickett ”»nfrtif«M«’ ”We shall find in his work neither the passion nor the strangeness of the Romantic school. Much in his nature disposed to shape him as a poet of Classicism, and with occasional reserves he is far more of a classical poet than a romantic. Yet throughout Cowpcr’s work we feel from time to time a note of something that is certainly not the note of Pope or Dryden, something deeper in feeling than meets us even in Thomson, Collins, or Gray.
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rhere is a tenderness hi poems like My Mother’s Picture, that not even Goldsmith in his verse can quite equal; while his fresh and intimate nature pictures point to a stage in the development of poetic naturalism, more considerable than we find in Thomson and his immediate successors.” George Crabbe (1754-1832) :-
He mostly continued the neocmsic tradition and was derisively dubbed as ”a Pope in worsted stockings.” In his poetry, which is mostly descriptive of the miseries of poor villagers, he was an uncompromising unromantic realist He asserted
I paint the Cot . ;
As Truth wiil paint it, and as Bards wiil not.
He showed much concern for villagers, but he left for Wordsworth to glorify their simplicity and, even, penury. Crabbe’s excessive boldness as a realist alienates him from the polish of the neociassic school. However, he tenaciously adhered to the heroic couplet, even when he was a contemporary of Blake and the romantic poets.
Robert Bums (1759-95) :-
He was a Scottish peasant who took to poetry and became the truly national poet of Scotland. His work Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) sky-rocketed him to fame. All these poems are imbued with the spirit of romantic lyricism in its untutored spontaneity, humour, pathos and sympathy with nature and her lowly creatures including the sons of the soil Sometimes indeed Burns tries to write in the ”correct” manner of the Popean school but then he becomes unimpressive and insipid. A critic observes: ”Burns was a real peasant who drove the plough as he hummed his songs, and who knew all the wretchedness and joys and sorrows of the countryman’s fife. Sincerity and passion are the chief keys of his verse. Burns can utter a piercing lyric cry as in A Fond Kiss and then we.Sever, can be gracefully sentimental as in My love is like a Red, Red Rose, can be coarsely witty as in The Jolty Beggars, but he is always sincere and passionate, and that is why his words go straight into the heart. Burns was influenced a great deal by the spirit of the French Revolution. His fellow-feeling extended even to the lower animals whom he studied minutely and treated sympathetically.
William Blake (1757-1827) :-
Blake was an out and out rebel against all the social, political, and literary conventions of the eighteenth century. It is with considerable
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The Novel of Terror/,331
inaccuracy that he can be included among the transitional poets pr the precursors of the Romantic Revival, as in many ways he is even more romantic than the romantic poets! The most undisciplined and the most lonely of all poets, he lived in his own world peopled by phantoms and spectres whom he treated as more real than the humdrum realities of the physical world. His glorification of childhood and feeling for nature make him akin to the romantic poets. He is best known for his throe thin volumes-Awf/cal Sketches (1783), Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794), which contain some of the most orient gems of English lyricism. A critic observes : ”His passion for freedom was, also, akin to that which moved Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey in their earlier years, though in its later form, it came nearer to Shelley’s revolt against convention. There is, indeed, an unusual degree of fellowship between these two : the imagery and symbolism, as well as the -underlying spirit, of The Revolt of Islam. X/arfor and Prometheus Unbound find their nearest parallel in Blake’s prophetic books. Both had visions of a world regenerated by a-gospel of universal brotherhood, transcending law.”
Q.53
Q.
/ THE NOVEL OF TERROR Q. 53 Write a brief essay on one of the following :
(c) The Novel of Terror.
(and four more topics) (Agra 1963)
Or Q. Write a note on the Gothic romance:
Or
Q. Mention the chief characteristics of the Gothic novel.
(Agra, 1967)
Or . Q. Write a short essay on any one of the following :
(d) Gothic Novel
(and four more topics) (Rohilkhand 1986)
Introduction :- .
Broadly speaking, the first half of the eighteenth century was a period of realism and didacticism in literature. The two new genres created in this period-the periodical essay and the novel-are particularly steeped in the realistic and didactic spirit. The note of realism in fiction which started with Daniel Defoe continued even in the second half of the century. It was-xarried forward by Richardson, Fielding, Siriollett, and Sterne. The novel all along was essentially concerned with life and society as they were, and often with the exploration of the ways and means to make them better. In addition to didacticism and
f£
Jl «
332 /A History of English Literature
realism, a note of sentimentalism can also be discerned ia later fictioa under the influence of Richardson. But sentimentalisn was only a secondary characteristic; the primary and essential characteristics of the novel from Defoe to Fanny Burney are realism tad didacticism.
But after Fanny Burney, and even some time before her, the English novel seems to have grown out of the. grooves of conventional realism and didacticism, The last yean of the eighteenth century are often dubbed as the age of transition-transition from the neodasskism of the school of Pope to the romanticism of the early nineteen!!) century. In these yeart we find a shift of emphasis in the novel too. Horace Walpole’ Castle ofOtnmto (1765) was the first work of fiction which broke away completely from the traditions of the realistic and didactic (and often, sentimental) novel and started the vogue of what is called ”the Gothic romance” or ”the novel of terror.” Walpole and his followers created is their novels a blood-curdling; and hair-raisiag world of haunted castles, eerie ruins, macabre ghosts, harrowing spectacles of murder, and a hundred other elements calculated to strike terror in the reader and to make him perspire ail over. Mostly, the ”terror novelists” were crude sensationalists whose works were mere schoolboy exercises devoid of any artistry. Most of them transported themselves to the medieval Europe supposedly full of the spirit of chivalry, romance, and mystery. As most of them turned to the Middle Ages for their material, they are called ”Gothic” novelists (Some of them, like William Beckford,however, looked to the Orient for their .material). Very few of these novelists showed any appreciable knowledge of human psychology, perhaps because no such knowledge was at all required for the kind of work they were up to. Most of them turned to the supernatural to add to the atmosphere of awe and terror. All this goes to show that the terror novelists were of the nature of crude and thrill-hungry romantics who came before die true efflorescence of romanticism in the eariy years of the nineteenth century. But some of them like Horace Walpole were in fact hard-boiled intellectuals who indulged in Gothic romance as an escape from the oppressive boredom of the world of reality. Their medievalism was, thus,a sham, a mode of escape. For the true romanticists like Coleridge acid Keats the hazy and romance-bathed Europe of the Middle Ages was a real world: they lived and breathed in it; they did not escape into it, as they were always there. But the terror novelists Eke Walpole were dilettantes and pseudo-medievalists who did not believe a word of all that they wrote. Their world was a make-believe world created just to kill a few idle hours which happened to be free .from any intellectual activity.
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The Novel of Terror / 333
After these preliminary remarks let us consider.individually the work of the more important of terror novelists.
Horace Walpole (17177) :-
Horace Walpole was the pioneer of the Gothic hovel in England. Just as Percy with his Redques and Macpherson with his Ossianic poems heralded the romantic movement in English poetry, Horace Walpole with his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) heralded ’the romantic movement in English fiction. He reacted against the realism, didacticism, and sentimentalism of the followers of Richardson and Fielding. He did not think higly of even Richardsonand Fielding themselves. After reading the fourth volume of Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison he set it aside saying: ”I was so tired of sets of people getting together, and saying, ’Pray, Miss, with whom are you in love ?’ His desire was to shake and shock such niminy-priminy sentimentalism and to give a story altogether chilling and thrilling. He said good-bye to his own age and chose for the scene of his novel Italy of the twelfth or thirteenth century, full of the spirit of mystery, supernaturalism, and crime. It is of interest to note that he was something of an antiquarian very much interested in the art of the Middle Ages, particulary Gothic architecture. Ifor Evans in A Short History of English Literature observes; ”Walpole carried out the medieval cult more completely than most of his contemporaries, and at Strawberry Hill he constructed a Gothic house, where he could dream himself back into the days of chivalry and monastic life.” Horace Walpole was the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the famous Prime Minister of England. He was a witness to the boredom of higher political life, and his medievalism was perhaps an escape from this oppressive boredom.
The Castle of Otranto was first published in 1764 and was given out to be the English translation of an old Italian manuscript. In the second edition, however, Walpole admitted that it was all his own work. The events narrated are supposed to belong to Italy of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The scene of action is the castle situated at Otranto. Manfred, the villain-hero, is the grandson of the usurper of the kingdom. He intends marrying his son to the beautiful Isabella,- but on the day of the marriage his son is mysteriously killed, and he himself decides to marry Isabella after divorcing his wife. But Isabella escapes with Theodore, a young peasant. Manfred decides to kill Isabella, but mistakenly kills his own daughter who loves Theodore and is at that instant accompanying him. The castle is thrown down by the spirit of the true ruler who had been killed by Manfred’s grandfather. Theodore
WM
334 /A History of English Literaturp
is revealed to be the son of that ruler. He marries Isabella and estab lishes himsetf as the ruler of the realm in place’ of Manfred.
The story is puerile in the extreme. Its Gothidsm and supernaturalism are also crude and unconvincing. Even the most naive reader will fail to believe such events as the walking of a picture, coming outof three drops of blood from the nose of a statue, and the descent of a huge helmet apparenly from nowhere-not to speak of the account of ghosts and the mysterious fulfilment of a prophecy. Walpole’s supernaturalism is not at all psychologically convincing like Coleridge’s foi example, or Shakespeare’s. It is strange to find Walpole comparing himself to Shakespeare in his use of he supernatural. He wrote :”Thal great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied”. Ifor Evans observes about this claim : ”It is as if all the poetry and character had been removed from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, only to leave the raw . mechanism of melodrama and the supernatural.” What in reality Walpole sincerely tried to copy from Shakespeare was the mixing of the ” tragic and comic elements by punctuating the very sombre narrative with instances of the naivete of domestic servants. But Walpole does not succeed here either. As George Sherburn points out, Walpole draws the domestic servants ”so feebly that they fail almost totally in comic power.”
Waipole’s medievalism is also sham. He never shows any real knowledge of the times and places which he handles in the story. As a historical novel The Castle ofOtnnto is, thus; worthless. His ”medieval escape,” as George Sherburn puts it,”simply provided a no man’s land where startling, thrilling, sensational happenings might be frequent.” Everything, however incredible, passes muster in a Gothic setting. No explanation of the supernatural incidents is considered desirable by Walpole at all, and none is offered.
The Castle of Otranto became, in spite of all its absurdities, quite popular, and was imitated by a large number of writers including Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe. Walpole with his own example set the tradition of Gothic romance which was obliged to him for numerous ”conventions.” According to Moody and Lovett, these conventional elements are :-
(i) ”a hero sullied by unmentionable crimes”;
(ii) ”several persecuted heroines”;
(iii) ”a castle with secret passages and haunted rooms”;
(iv) ”a plentiful sprinkling of supernatural terrors.”
The Novel of terror A335
Mrs. Ann Radcliffc (1764-1823) :-
Though Mrs Radcliffe was an imitator of Walpole yet her attempts at the Gothic romance were much more successful and artistic than Walpole’s. She was in fact the ablest and the best of all the practitioners of this kind of writing. She was the loving wife of a journalist, and wrote five romances just to while away her leisure. The most famous among them are The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1764) and Tlie Italian (1797). The scene in both of them is the mysterious land of Italy : in the former Italy of the sixteenth century, and in the latter that of the eighteenth. Mrs. Radcliffe almost always wrote to a formula. A beautiful young woman is kept imprisoned by a hardened, sadistic villain, in a lonely castle, and is ultimately rescued by a somewhat colourless hero. These heroes and heroines are all modelled after the same pattern. The only variety the heroines admit of is of their complexion. Otherwise, all are sentimental, and, in Compton – Rickett’s words,”are true sisters of Clarissa, both in emotional expression and in moral impeccability.” Add to all that the usual paraphernalia of terror elements. ”She”, observes Louis I. Bredvold, ”availed herself to the fullest of loathsome dungeons, secret vaults and corridors, all essential features of the castles of Gothic romance.” Let us consider the’main points of her work, in most of which she differs from Walpole
(a) She is quite timid in her use of the supernatural. Just before the end of a novel she tries to explain away all the supernatural incidents as misunderstood versions of quite natural phenomena. She works very well through subtle suggestion, especially through the description of eerie sounds.
(b) She introduces in her novels the element of scenic description which was altogether neglected by Walpole. She is perhaps the first of English novelists in her interest in the scenery for its own sake. She never vistcd the countries she dealt with in her novels, but her descriptions are vivid and entirely credible.
(c) Her grasp of real history is as poor as Walpole’s. On the very first page of The Mysteries of Udolpho she expressly tells us that the indcidents of the story belong to the year 1584. However, this year could easily be substituted by another without any difference.
(d) In her novels she reconciles didacticism and sentunentalism with romance, whereas Walpope had entirely forsaken the realistic, didactic, and sentimental tradition of eighteenth-century novel.
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Matthew Lewis or ”Monk” Lewis (1775-1818) :
Matthew Lewis, nicknamed ”Monk” Lewis on account of his’ Gothic romance of that title, seems to have completely neglected the lesson of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe. The Monk is a blood-curdling nightmare of macabresque ghosts, rotten corpses, weird magic and witchcraft, and a thousand other horrifying elements. According to Samuel C. Chew,”in The Monk (1797), a nightmare of fiendish wickedness, ghostly supernaturalism and sadistic sensuality, there is almost indubitably something else than mere literary sensationalism: it gives evidence of a f ychopathic condition perhaps inherent in the extremes of the romantic temperament” He further observes that ”The Monk may be considered the dream of an ’oversexed’ adolescent, for Lewis was only twenty when he wrote it.” Lewis ne\jr made any attempt like Mrs. Ann Radciiffe to rationalise his supernatural. He was out for the crudest sensationalism, and therefore he’ cannot be ranked high among the terror novelists, in spite of being the most terrifying of all
Miss Clara Reeve (1729-1807), Charles Robert Marurin 0782-1824), and Mrs. Shelley (1797-1851) :-
They were the most important of the rest of Gothic novelists. Miss Clara Reeve’s Champion of Hrtw«vafterwards entitled The OldEngfish Baron, was obviously inspired by Walpole. She laid the scene in England of Henry VI, but, like Walpole, she did not show much genuine knowledge of the age she handled. Compton-Rickettvbserves: ”Miss Reeve thoughtto improve upon the original and economised with her supernatural effects; but she only succeeded in exceeding Wdpole’s tale in its tedium, repeating most of his absurdities and showing even less acquaintance with medieval life.”
Maturin wrote his romance The Fatal Revenge (1307) as a follower of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe. However, his masterpiece is Metmoth the Wanderer (1820) which, according to Samuel C. Chew, is ”the greatest novel of the school of terror.” It differs from most novels of this type in its well-patterned structure and its attempt at the analysis of motive.’
Mary Wollstonecraft ShcDcy1 Frankenstein (1817) is, in the words of Samuel C Chew,”the only novel of terror that is still famous. It is the story of the ravages of a man-made monster equivalent to the modem ”robot”. Decidedly, Mrs. ShcUey’s.work gave many hints to the future writers of science fiction such as H. G.Wells. She may with equal justice be considered the first of the writers of science fiction as the last of the novelists of the terror school
The Novel of Terror / 337
William Beckford (1760-1844)-the Oriental Romance :-
Beckford, in Compton-Rickett’s words, ”was certainly a man of considerable force of intellect and brilliant though hectic imagination.” Though he was a novelist of the terror school yet we cannot include him among the Gothic romancers, as his novel Vathek (1786) had for its background not a European country of the Middle Ages, but the Arabia of yore. He was probably influenced by the mass of translated versions of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese tales which were flooding the England of his times. In Vathek there is, to be sure, the usual presence of a good quantity of the terror apparatus. Vathek is a caliph, a kind of Moslem Faust us,who sells his soul to Eblis (the Devil). The description of his end and the fiery hell is, indeed, the most’ terrifying. In league with Eblis Vathek commits the most bloodcurdling crimes, and his end is as horrifying as his deeds. Beckford succeeds ic conveying a rich impression of Oriental magnificence and splendour .combined with unchecked sensuality. Vathek was immensely popular for the exotic thrills offered by it.
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