the century to whom all credit is due as pioneers and precentors
of the romantic movement under the depressing conditions to
which innovators in poetry are commonly subject. They may
strike us as rather an anaemic band after the great Elizabethan
poets. Four of them were mentally deranged (Collins, Smart,
Cowper, Blake), while Gray was a hermit, and Shenstone and
Thomson the most indolent of recluses. The most adventurous,
one might say the most virile of the group, was a boy who died
at the age of seventeen. Single men all (save for Blake), a more
despondent group of artists as a whole it would not perhaps be
easy to discover. Catacombs and cypresses were the forms of
imagery that came to them most naturally. Elegies and funeral
odes were the types of expression in which they were happiest.
Yet they strove in the main to follow the gleam in poetry, to
reinstate imagination upon its throne, and to substitute the singing
voice for the rhetorical recitative of the heroic couplet. Within
two years of the death of Pope, in 1746, William Collins was
content to sing (not say) what he had in him without a glimpse
of wit or a flash of eloquence—and in him many have discerned
the germ of that romantic éclosion which blossomed in Christabel.
A more important if less original factor in that movement was
Collins’s severe critic Thomas Gray, a man of the widest curiosities
of his time, in whom every attribute of the poet to which scholarship,
taste and refinement are contributory may be found to the
full, but in whom the strong creative energy is fatally lacking—despite
the fact that he wrote a string of “divine truisms” in
his Elegy, which has given to multitudes more of the exquisite
pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in the English
language. Shenstone and Percy, Capell, the Wartons and
eventually Chatterton, continued to mine in the shafts which
Gray had been the first to sink. Their laborious work of discovery
resembled that which was commencing in regard to the
Gothic architecture which the age of Pope had come to regard
as rude and barbaric. The Augustans had come seriously to
regard all pre-Drydenic poetry as grossly barbarian. One of
the greatest achievements of the mid-eighteenth century was
concerned with the disintegration of this obstinate delusion.
The process was manifold; and it led, among other things, to
a realization of the importance of the study of comparative
literature.
The literary grouping of the 18th century is, perhaps, the biggest thing on the whole that English art has to show; but among all its groups the most famous, and probably the most original, is that of its proto-novelists Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. All nations have The novel. had their novels, which are as old at least as Greek vases. The various types have generally had collective appellations such as Milesian Tales, Alexandrian Romances, Romances of Chivalry, Acta Sanctorum, Gesta Romanorum, Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Romances of Roguery, Arabian Nights; but owing to the rivalry of other more popular or more respectable or at least more eclectic literary forms, they seldom managed to attain a permanent lodgment in the library. The taste in prose fiction changes, perhaps, more rapidly than that in any other kind of literature. In Britain alone several forms had passed their prime since the days of Caxton and his Arthurian prose romance of Morte d’Arthur. Such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic; the new centos of tales of chivalry like the Seven Champions of Christendom; the utopian, political and philosophical romances (Oceana, The Man in the Moone); the grotesque and facetious stories of rogues retailed from the Spanish or French in dwarf volumes; the prolix romance of modernized classic heroism (The Grand Cyrus); the religious allegory (Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr Badman); the novels of outspoken French or Italian gallantry, represented by Aphra Behn; the imaginary voyages so notably adapted to satire by Dr Swift; and last, but not least, the minutely prosaic chronicle-novels of Daniel Defoe. The prospect of the novel was changing rapidly. The development of the individual and of a large well-to-do urban middle class, which was rapidly multiplying its area of leisure, involved a curious and self-conscious society, hungry for pleasure and new sensations, anxious to be told about themselves, willing in some cases even to learn civilization from their betters. The disrepute into which the drama had fallen since Jeremy Collier’s attack on it directed this society by an almost inevitable course into the flowery paths of fiction. The novel, it is true, had a reputation which was for the time being almost as unsavoury as that of the drama, but the novel was not a confirmed ill-doer, and it only needed a touch of genius to create for it a vast congregation of enthusiastic votaries. In the Tatler and Spectator were already found the methods and subjects of the modern novel. The De Coverley papers in the Spectator, in fact, want nothing but a love-thread to convert them into a serial novel of a high order. The supreme importance of the sentimental interest had already been discovered and exemplified to good purpose in France by Madame de la Fayette, the Marquise de Tencin, Marivaux and the Abbé Prevost. Richardson. Samuel Richardson (1689–1762), therefore, when he produced the first two modern novels of European fame in Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), inherited far more than he invented. There had been Richardsonians before Richardson. Clarissa is nevertheless a pioneer work, and we have it on the high authority of M. Jusserand that the English have contributed more than any other people to the formation of the contemporary novel. Of the long-winded, typical and rather chaotic English novel of love analysis and moral sentiment (as opposed to the romance of adventure) Richardson is the first successful charioteer.
The novel in England gained prodigiously by the shock of opposition between the ideals of Richardson and Henry Fielding (1707–1754), his rival and parodist. Fielding’s brutal toleration is a fine corrective to the slightly rancid morality of Richardson, with its frank insistence upon the Fielding. cash-value of chastity and virtue. Fielding is, to be brief, the succinct antithesis of Richardson, and represents the opposite pole of English character. He is the Cavalier, Richardson the Roundhead; he is the gentleman, Richardson the tradesman; he represents church and county, Richardson chapel and borough. Richardson had much of the patient insight and intensity of genius, but he lacked the humour and literary accomplishment which Fielding had in rich abundance. Fielding combined breadth and keenness, classical culture and a delicate Gallic irony to an extent rare among English writers. He lacked the delicate intuition of Richardson in the analysis of women, nor Smollett. could he compass the broad farcical humour of Smollett or the sombre colouring by which Smollett produces at times such poignant effects of contrast. There was no poetry in Fielding; but there was practically every other ingredient of a great prose writer—taste, culture, order, vivacity, humour, penetrating irony and vivid, pervading common sense, and it is Fielding’s chef-d’œuvre Tom Jones (1749) that we must regard if not as the fundament at least as the head of the corner in English prose fiction. Before Tom Jones appeared, the success of the novel had drawn a new competitor into the field in Tobias Smollett, the descendant of a good western lowland family who had knocked about the world and seen more of its hurlyburly than Fielding himself. In Roderick Random (1748) Smollett represents a rougher and more uncivilized world even than that depicted in Joseph Andrews. The savagery and horse-play peculiar to these two novelists derives in part from the rogue romance of Spain (as then recently revived by Lesage), and has a counterpart to some extent in the graphic art of Hogarth and Rowlandson; yet one cannot altogether ignore an element of exaggeration which has greatly injured both these writers in the estimation (and still more in the affection) of posterity. The genius which struggles through novels such as Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom was nearly submerged under the hard conditions of a general writer during the third quarter of the 18th century, and it speaks volumes for Smollett’s powers of recuperation that he survived to write two such masterpieces of sardonic and humorous observation as his Travels and Humphry Clinker.
The fourth proto-master of the English novel was the antiquarian humorist Lawrence Sterne. Though they owed a
