his fops the gaiety and insolence of the world he knew. The
society depicted by William Wycherley, the one comic dramatist
of power between Massinger and Congreve, at first
seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and
Wycherley.
faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic
reckless exhibition of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges
in the most callous good spirits and with careful cynicism. The
Plain Dealer (1677), a skilful transplantation, as well as a depravation
of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, is his best piece: he
writes in prose, and his prose is excellent, modern and lifelike.
Bibliography.—General Histories: Hallam, Introduction to the Lit. of Europe (1838–1839); G. Saintsbury, Elizabethan Literature (1890), and History of Literary Criticism, vol. ii. (1902); W. J. Courthorpe, History of English Poetry, vols. i.-v. (1895–1905); J. J. Jusserand, Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais, vol. ii. (1904); T. Seccombe and J. W. Allen, The Age of Shakespeare (2 vols., 1903); D. Hannay, The Later Renaissance (1898); H. J. C. Grierson, First Half of 17th Century; O. Elton, The Augustan Ages (1899); Masson, Life of Milton (6 vols., London, 1881–1894); R. Garnett, The Age of Dryden (1901); W. Raleigh, The English Novel (1894); J. J. Jusserand, Le Roman anglais au temps de Shakespeare (1887, Eng. tr., 1901); G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (2 vols., 1904, reprints and introd.). Classical and Foreign Influences.—Mary A. Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (bibliography), (Baltimore, 1895); E. Koeppel, Studien zur Gesch. der ital. Novelle i. d. eng. Litteratur des 16ten Jahrh. (Strasb., 1892); L. Einstein The Italian Renaissance in England (New York, 1902); J. Erskine, The Elizabethan Lyric (New York, 1903); J. S. Harrison, Platonism in Eliz. Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries (New York, 1903); S. Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols., 1904); C. H. Herford, Literary Relations of England and Germany in 16th Century; J. G. Underhill, Spanish Lit. in the England of the Tudors (New York, 1899); J. E. Spingarn, Hist. of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1899). Many articles in Englische Studien, Anglia, &c., on influences, texts and sources. See too arts. Drama; Sonnet; Renaissance. (O. E.*)
V. The 18th Century
In the reign of Anne (1702–1714) the social changes which had commenced with the Restoration of 1660 began to make themselves definitely felt. Books began to penetrate among all classes of society. The period is consequently one of differentiation and expansion. As the practice of Social changes. reading becomes more and more universal, English writers lose much of their old idiosyncrasy, intensity and obscurity. As in politics and religion, so in letters, there is a great development of nationality. Commercial considerations too for the first time become important. We hear relatively far less of religious controversy, of the bickering between episcopalians and nonconformists and of university squabbles. Specialization and cumbrous pedantry fall into profound disfavour. Provincial feeling exercises a diminishing sway, and literature becomes increasingly metropolitan or suburban. With the multiplication of moulds, the refinement of prose polish, and the development of breadth, variety and ease, it was natural enough, having regard to the place that the country played in the world’s affairs, that English literature should make its début in western Europe. The strong national savour seemed to stimulate the foreign appetite, and as represented by Swift, Pope, Defoe, Young, Goldsmith, Richardson, Sterne and Ossian, if we exclude Byron and Scott, the 18th century may be deemed the cosmopolitan age, par excellence, of English Letters. The charms of 18th-century English literature, as it happens, are essentially of the rational, social and translatable kind: in intensity, exquisiteness and eccentricity of the choicer kinds it is proportionately deficient. It is pre-eminently an age of prose, and although verbal expression is seldom represented at its highest power, we shall find nearly every variety of English prose brilliantly illustrated during this period: the aristocratic style of Bolingbroke, Addison and Berkeley; the gentlemanly style of Fielding; the keen and logical controversy of Butler, Middleton, Smith and Bentham; the rhythmic and balanced if occasionally involved style of Johnson and his admirers; the limpid and flowing manner of Hume and Mackintosh; the light, easy and witty flow of Walpole; the divine chit-chat of Cowper; the colour of Gray and Berkeley; the organ roll of Burke; the detective journalism of Swift and Defoe; the sly familiarity of Sterne; the dance music and wax candles of Sheridan; the pomposity of Gibbon; the air and ripple of Goldsmith; the peeping preciosity of Boswell,—these and other characteristics can be illustrated in 18th-century prose as probably nowhere else.
But more important to the historian of literature even than the development of qualities is the evolution of types. And in this respect the 18th century is a veritable index-museum of English prose. Essentially, no doubt, it is true that in form the prose and verse of the 18th century is mainly an extension of Dryden, just as in content it is a reflection of the increased variety of the city life which came into existence as English trade rapidly increased in all directions. But the taste of the day was rapidly changing. People began to read in vastly increasing numbers. The folio was making place on the shelves for the octavo. The bookseller began to transcend the mere tradesman. Along with newspapers the advertizing of books came into fashion, and the market was regulated no longer by what learned men wanted to write, but what an increasing multitude wanted to read. The arrival of the octavo is said to have marked the enrolment of man as a reader, that of the novel the attachment of woman. Hence, among other causes, the rapid decay of lyrical verse and printed drama, of theology and epic, in ponderous tomes. The fashionable types of which the new century was to witness the fixation are accordingly the essay and the satire as represented respectively by Addison and Steele, Swift and Goldsmith, and by Pope and Churchill. Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was the first Englishman who treated letter-writing as an art upon a considerable scale. Personalities and memoirs prepare the way for history, in which as a department of literature English letters hitherto had been almost scandalously deficient. Similarly the new growth of fancy essay (Addison) and plain biography (Defoe) prepared the way for the English novel, the most important by far of all new literary combinations. Finally, without going into unnecessary detail, we have a significant development of topography, journalism and criticism. In the course of time, too, we shall perceive how the pressure of town life and the logic of a capital city engender, first a fondness for landscape gardening and a somewhat artificial Arcadianism, and then, by degrees, an intensifying love of the country, of the open air, and of the rare, exotic and remote in literature.
At the outset of the new century the two chief architects of public opinion were undoubtedly John Locke and Joseph Addison. When he died at High Laver in October 1704 at the mature age of seventy-two, Locke had, perhaps, done more than any man of the previous Locke; Addison. century to prepare the way for the new era. Social duty and social responsibility were his two watchwords. The key to both he discerned in the Human Understanding—“no province of knowledge can be regarded as independent of reason.” But the great modernist of the time was undoubtedly Joseph Addison (1672–1719). He first left the 17th century, with its stiff euphuisms, its formal obsequiousness, its ponderous scholasticism and its metaphorical antitheses, definitely behind. He did for English culture what Rambouillet did for that of France, and it is hardly an exaggeration to call the half-century before the great fame of the English novel, the half century of the Spectator.
Addison’s mind was fertilized by intercourse with the greater and more original genius of Swift and with the more inventive and more genial mind of Steele. It was Richard Steele (1672–1729) in the Tatler of 1709–1710 who first realized that the specific which that urbane age both needed Steele. and desired was no longer copious preaching and rigorous declamation, but homoeopathic doses of good sense, good taste and good-humoured morality, disguised beneath an easy and fashionable style. Nothing could have suited Addison better than the opportunity afforded him of contributing an occasional essay or roundabout paper in praise of virtue or dispraise of stupidity and bad form to his friend’s periodical. When the Spectator succeeded the Tatler in March 1711, Addison took a more active share in shaping the chief characters (with the immortal baronet, Sir Roger, at their head) who were to make
