up the “Spectator Club”; and, better even than before, he saw
his way, perhaps, to reinforcing his copious friend with his own
more frugal but more refined endowment. Such a privileged
talent came into play at precisely the right moment to circulate
through the coffee houses and to convey a large measure of French
courtly ease and elegance into the more humdrum texture of
English prose. Steele became rather disreputable in his later
years, Swift was banished and went mad, but Addison became
a personage of the utmost consideration, and the essay as he
left it became an almost indispensable accomplishment to the
complete gentlemen of that age. As an architect of opinion
from 1717 to 1775 Addison may well rank with Locke.
The other side, both in life and politics, was taken by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), who preferred to represent man on his unsocial side. He sneered at most things, but not at his own order, and he came to defend the church and the country squirearchy against the conventicle and Capel court. To undermine Swift. the complacent entrenchments of the Whig capitalists at war with France no sap proved so effectual as his pen. Literary influence was then exercised in politics mainly by pamphlets, and Swift was the greatest of pamphleteers. In the Journal to Stella he has left us a most wonderful portrait of himself in turn currying favour, spoiled, petted and humiliated by the party leaders of the Tories from 1710–1713. He had always been savage, and when the Hanoverians came in and he was treated as a suspect, his hate widened to embrace all mankind (Gulliver’s Travels, 1726) and he bit like a mad dog. Would that he could have bitten more, for the infection of English stylists! In wit, logic, energy, pith, resourcefulness and Saxon simplicity, his prose has never been equalled. The choicest English then, it is Arbuthnot. the choicest English still. Dr John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) may be described as an understudy of Swift on the whimsical side only, whose malignity, in a nature otherwise most kindly, was circumscribed strictly by the limits of political persiflage. Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), unorthodox as he was in every respect, discovered a little of Swift’s choice pessimism in his assault (in The Fable of the Bees of 1723) against the genteel optimism of the Characteristics of Lord Shaftesbury. Neither the matter nor the manner of the brilliant Bolingbroke. Tory chieftain Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), appears to us now as being of the highest significance; but, although Bolingbroke’s ideas were second-hand, his work has an historical importance; his dignified, balanced and decorated style was the cynosure of 18th-century statesmen. His essays on “History” and on “a Patriot King” both disturb a soil well prepared, and set up a reaction against such evil tendencies as a narrowing conception of history and a primarily factious and partisan conception of politics. It may be noted here how the fall of Bolingbroke and the Tories in 1714 precipitated the decay of the Renaissance ideal of literary patronage. The dependence of the press upon the House of Lords was already an anomaly, and the practical toleration achieved in 1695 removed another obstacle from the path of liberation. The government no longer sought to strangle the press. It could generally be tuned satisfactorily and at the worst could always be temporarily muzzled. The pensions hitherto devoted to men of genius were diverted under Walpole to spies and journalists. Yet one of the most unscrupulous of all the fabricators of intelligence, looked down upon as a huckster of the meanest and most inconsiderable literary wares, established his fame by a masterpiece of which literary genius had scarcely even cognizance.
The new trade of writing was represented most perfectly by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), who represents, too, what few writers possess, a competent knowledge of work and wages, buying and selling, the squalor and roguery of the very hungry and the very mean. From reporting sensations and Defoe. chronicling faits divers, Defoe worked his way almost insensibly to the Spanish tale of the old Mendoza or picaresque pattern. Robinson Crusoe was a true story expanded on these lines, and written down under stress of circumstance when its author was just upon sixty. Resembling that of Bunyan and, later, Smollett in the skilful use made of places, facts and figures, Defoe’s style is the mirror of man in his shirt sleeves. What he excelled in was plain, straightforward story-telling, in understanding and appraising the curiosity of the man in the street, and in possessing just the knowledge and just the patience, and just the literary stroke that would enable him most effectually to satisfy it. He was the first and cleverest of all descriptive reporters, for he knew better than any successor how and where to throw in those irrelevant details, tricks of speech and circumlocution, which tend to give an air of verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative—the funny little splutterings and naïvetés as of a plain man who is not telling a tale for effect, but striving after his own manner to give the plain unvarnished truth. Defoe contributes story, Addison character, Fielding the life-atmosphere, Richardson and Sterne the sentiment, and we have the 18th-century novel complete—the greatest literary birth of modern time. Addison, Steele, Swift and Defoe, as master-builders of prose fiction, are consequently of more importance than the “Augustan poets,” as Pope and his school are sometimes called, for the most that they can be said to have done is to have perfected a more or less transient mode of poetry.
To the passion, imagination or musical quality essential to the most inspired kinds of poetry Alexander Pope (1688–1744) can lay small claim. His best work is contained in the Satires and Epistles, which are largely of the proverb-in-rhyme order. Yet in lucid, terse and pungent Pope. phrases he has rarely if ever been surpassed. His classical fancy, his elegant turn for periphrasis and his venomous sting alike made him the idol of that urbane age. Voltaire in 1726 had called him the best poet living, and at his death his style was paramount throughout the civilized world. It was the apotheosis of wit, point, lucidity and technical correctness. Pope was the first Englishman to make poetry pay (apart from patronage). He was flattered by imitation to an extent which threatened to throw the school of poetry which he represented into permanent discredit. Prior, Gay, Parnell, Akenside, Pomfret, Garth, Young, Johnson, Goldsmith, Falconer, Glover, Grainger, Darwin, Rogers, Hayley and indeed a host of others—the once famous mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease—worshipped Pope as their poetic founder. The second-rate wore his badge. But although the cult of Pope was the established religion of poetic taste from 1714 to 1798, there were always nonconformists. The poetic revolt, indeed, was far more versatile than the religious revival of the century. The Winter Thomson. (1726) of James Thomson may be regarded as inaugurating a new era in English poetry. Lady Winchilsea, John Philips, author of Cyder, and John Dyer, whose Grongar Hill was published a few months before Winter, had pleaded by their work for a truthful and unaffected, and at the same time a romantic treatment of nature in poetry; but the ideal of artificiality and of a frigid poetic diction by which English poetry was dominated since the days of Waller and Cowley was first effectively challenged by Thomson. At the time when the Popean couplet was at the height of its vogue he deliberately put it aside in favour of the higher poetic power of blank verse. And he it was who transmitted the sentiment of natural beauty not merely to imitators such as Savage, Armstrong, Somerville, Collins. Gray. Langhorne, Mickle and Shenstone, but also to his elegist, William Collins, to Gray and to Cowper, and so indirectly to the lyrical bards of 1798. By the same hands and those of Shenstone experiments were being made in the stanza of The Faerie Queene; a little later, owing to the virtuosity of Bishop Percy, the cultivation of the old English and Scottish ballad literature was beginning to take a serious turn. Dissatisfaction with the limitations of “Augustan” poetry was similarly responsible for the revived interest in Shakespeare and Chaucer. Gray stood not only for a far more intimate worship of wild external nature, but also for an awakened curiosity in Scandinavian, Celtic and Icelandic poetry.
To pretend then that the poetic heart of the 18th century was Popean to the core is nothing short of extravagance. There were a number of true poets in the second and third quarters of
