Book: A History of English Literature

R >> Robert Huntington Fletcher >> A History of English Literature




Despite his political success, Swift was still unable to secure the
definite object of his ambition, a bishopric in England, since the levity
with which he had treated holy things in 'A Tale of a Tub' had hopelessly
prejudiced Queen Anne against him and the ministers could not act
altogether in opposition to her wishes. In 1713 he received the unwelcome
gift of the deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, and the next
year, when the Queen died and the Tory ministry fell, he withdrew to
Dublin, as he himself bitterly said, 'to die like a poisoned rat in a
hole.'

In Swift's personal life there were now events in which he again showed to
very little advantage. In London he had become acquainted with a certain
Hester Vanhomrigh, the 'Vanessa' of his longest poem, 'Cadenus and Vanessa'
(in which 'Cadenus' is an anagram of 'Decanus,' Latin for 'Dean,' i. e.,
Swift). Miss Vanhomrigh, like 'Stella,' was infatuated with Swift, and like
her followed him to Ireland, and for nine years, as has been said, he
'lived a double life' between the two. 'Vanessa' then died, probably of a
broken heart, and 'Stella' a few years later. Over against this conduct, so
far as it goes, may be set Swift's quixotic but extensive and constant
personal benevolence and generosity to the poor.

In general, this last period of Swift's life amounted to thirty years of
increasing bitterness. He devoted some of his very numerous pamphlets to
defending the Irish, and especially the English who formed the governing
class in Ireland, against oppression by England. Most important here were
'The Drapier's [i.e., Draper's, Cloth-Merchant's] Letters,' in which Swift
aroused the country to successful resistance against a very unprincipled
piece of political jobbery whereby a certain Englishman was to be allowed
to issue a debased copper coinage at enormous profit to himself but to the
certain disaster of Ireland. 'A Modest Proposal,' the proposal, namely,
that the misery of the poor in Ireland should be alleviated by the raising
of children for food, like pigs, is one of the most powerful, as well as
one of the most horrible, satires which ever issued from any human
imagination. In 1726 (seven years after 'Robinson Crusoe') appeared Swift's
masterpiece, the only one of his works still widely known, namely, 'The
Travels of Lemuel Gulliver.' The remarkable power of this unique work lies
partly in its perfect combination of two apparently inconsistent things,
first, a story of marvelous adventure which must always remain (in the
first parts) one of the most popular of children's classics; and second, a
bitter satire against mankind. The intensity of the satire increases as the
work proceeds. In the first voyage, that to the Lilliputians, the tone is
one mainly of humorous irony; but in such passages as the hideous
description of the _Struldbrugs_ in the third voyage the cynical
contempt is unspeakably painful, and from the distorted libel on mankind in
the _Yahoos_ of the fourth voyage a reader recoils in indignant
disgust.

During these years Swift corresponded with friends in England, among them
Pope, whom he bitterly urged to 'lash the world for his sake,' and he once
or twice visited England in the hope, even then, of securing a place in the
Church on the English side of St. George's Channel. His last years were
melancholy in the extreme. Long before, on noticing a dying tree, he had
observed, with the pitiless incisiveness which would spare neither others
nor himself: 'I am like that. I shall die first at the top.' His birthday
he was accustomed to celebrate with lamentations. At length an obscure
disease which had always afflicted him, fed in part, no doubt, by his fiery
spirit and his fiery discontent, reached his brain. After some years of
increasing lethargy and imbecility, occasionally varied by fits of violent
madness and terrible pain, he died in 1745, leaving all his money to found
a hospital for the insane. His grave in St. Patrick's Cathedral bears this
inscription of his own composing, the best possible epitome of his career:
'Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit' (Where fierce
indignation can no longer tear his heart).

The complexity of Swift's character and the great difference between the
viewpoints of his age and of ours make it easy at the present time to judge
him with too great harshness. Apart from his selfish egotism and his
bitterness, his nature was genuinely loyal, kind and tender to friends and
connections; and he hated injustice and the more flagrant kinds of
hypocrisy with a sincere and irrepressible violence. Whimsicalness and a
contemptuous sort of humor were as characteristic of him as biting sarcasm,
and his conduct and writings often veered rapidly from the one to the other
in a way puzzling to one who does not understand him. Nevertheless he was
dominated by cold intellect and an instinct for the practical. To show
sentiment, except under cover, he regarded as a weakness, and it is said
that when he was unable to control it he would retire from observation. He
was ready to serve mankind to the utmost of his power when effort seemed to
him of any avail, and at times he sacrificed even his ambition to his
convictions; but he had decided that the mass of men were hopelessly
foolish, corrupt, and inferior, personal sympathy with them was impossible
to him, and his contempt often took the form of sardonic practical jokes,
practised sometimes on a whole city. Says Sir Leslie Stephen in his life of
Swift: 'His doctrine was that virtue is the one thing which deserves love
and admiration, and yet that virtue in this hideous chaos of a world
involves misery and decay.' Of his extreme arrogance and brutality to those
who offended him there are numerous anecdotes; not least in the case of
women, whom he, like most men of his age, regarded as man's inferiors. He
once drove a lady from her own parlor in tears by violent insistence that
she should sing, against her will, and when he next met her, inquired,
'Pray, madam, are you as proud and ill-natured to-day as when I saw you
last?' It seems, indeed, that throughout his life Swift's mind was
positively abnormal, and this may help to excuse the repulsive elements in
his writings. For metaphysics and abstract principles, it may be added, he
had a bigoted antipathy. In religion he was a staunch and sincere High
Churchman, but it was according to the formal fashion of many thinkers of
his day; he looked on the Church not as a medium of spiritual life, of
which he, like his generation, had little conception, but as one of the
organized institutions of society, useful in maintaining decency and order.

Swift's 'poems' require only passing notice. In any strict sense they are
not poems at all, since they are entirely bare of imagination, delicacy,
and beauty. Instead they exhibit the typical pseudo-classical traits of
matter-of-factness and clearness; also, as Swift's personal notes,
cleverness, directness, trenchant intellectual power, irony, and entire
ease, to which latter the prevailing octosyllabic couplet meter
contributes. This is the meter of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso,' and the
contrast between these poems and Swift's is instructive.

Swift's prose style has substantially the same qualities. Writing generally
as a man of affairs, for practical ends, he makes no attempt at elegance
and is informal even to the appearance of looseness of expression. Of
conscious refinements and also, in his stories, of technical artistic
structural devices, he has no knowledge; he does not go out of the straight
path in order to create suspense, he does not always explain difficulties
of detail, and sometimes his narrative becomes crudely bare. He often
displays the greatest imaginative power, but it is always a practical
imagination; his similes, for example, are always from very matter-of-fact
things. But more notable are his positive merits. He is always absolutely
clear, direct, and intellectually forceful; in exposition and argument he
is cumulatively irresistible; in description and narration realistically
picturesque and fascinating; and he has the natural instinct for narration
which gives vigorous movement and climax. Indignation and contempt often
make his style burn with passion, and humor, fierce or bitterly mirthful,
often enlivens it with startling flashes.

The great range of the satires which make the greater part of Swift's work
is supported in part by variety of satiric method. Sometimes he pours out a
savage direct attack. Sometimes, in a long ironical statement, he says
exactly the opposite of what he really means to suggest. Sometimes he uses
apparently logical reasoning where either, as in 'A Modest Proposal,' the
proposition, or, as in the 'Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,' the
arguments are absurd. He often shoots out incidental humorous or satirical
shafts. But his most important and extended method is that of allegory. The
pigmy size of the Lilliputians symbolizes the littleness of mankind and
their interests; the superior skill in rope-dancing which with them is the
ground for political advancement, the political intrigues of real men; and
the question whether eggs shall be broken on the big or the little end,
which has embroiled Lilliput in a bloody war, both civil and foreign, the
trivial causes of European conflicts. In Brobdingnag, on the other hand,
the coarseness of mankind is exhibited by the magnifying process. Swift,
like Defoe, generally increases the verisimilitude of his fictions and his
ironies by careful accuracy in details, which is sometimes arithmetically
genuine, sometimes only a hoax. In Lilliput all the dimensions are
scientifically computed on a scale one-twelfth as large as that of man; in
Brobdingnag, by an exact reversal, everything is twelve times greater than
among men. But the long list of technical nautical terms which seem to make
a spirited narrative at the beginning of the second of Gulliver's voyages
is merely an incoherent hodge-podge.

Swift, then, is the greatest of English satirists and the only one who as a
satirist claims large attention in a brief general survey of English
literature. He is one of the most powerfully intellectual of all English
writers, and the clear force of his work is admirable; but being first a
man of affairs and only secondarily a man of letters, he stands only on the
outskirts of real literature. In his character the elements were greatly
mingled, and in our final judgment of him there must be combined something
of disgust, something of admiration, and not a little of sympathy and pity.

STEELE AND ADDISON AND 'THE TATLER' AND 'THE SPECTATOR' The writings of
Steele and Addison, of which the most important are their essays in 'The
Tatler' and 'The Spectator,' contrast strongly with the work of Swift and
are more broadly characteristic of the pseudo-classical period.

Richard Steele was born in Dublin in 1672 of an English father and an Irish
mother. The Irish strain was conspicuous throughout his life in his
warm-heartedness, impulsiveness and lack of self-control and practical
judgment. Having lost his father early, he was sent to the Charterhouse
School in London, where he made the acquaintance of Addison, and then to
Oxford. He abandoned the university to enlist in the aristocratic regiment
of Life Guards, and he remained in the army, apparently, for seven or eight
years, though he seems not to have been in active service and became a
recognized wit at the London coffee-houses. Thackeray in 'Henry Esmond'
gives interesting though freely imaginative pictures of him at this stage
of his career and later. His reckless instincts and love of pleasure were
rather strangely combined with a sincere theoretical devotion to religion,
and his first noticeable work (1701), a little booklet called 'The
Christian Hero,' aimed, in opposition to fashionable license, to show that
decency and goodness are requisites of a real gentleman. The resultant
ridicule forced him into a duel (in which he seriously wounded his
antagonist), and thenceforth in his writings duelling was a main object of
his attacks. During the next few years he turned with the same reforming
zeal to comedy, where he attempted to exalt pure love and high ideals,
though the standards of his age and class leave in his own plays much that
to-day seems coarse. Otherwise his plays are by no means great; they
initiated the weak 'Sentimental Comedy,' which largely dominated the
English stage for the rest of the century. During this period Steele was
married twice in rather rapid succession to wealthy ladies whose fortunes
served only very temporarily to respite him from his chronic condition of
debt and bailiff's duns.

Now succeeds the brief period of his main literary achievement. All his
life a strong Whig, he was appointed in 1707 Gazetteer, or editor, of 'The
London Gazette,' the official government newspaper. This led him in 1709 to
start 'The Tatler.' English periodical literature, in forms which must be
called the germs both of the modern newspaper and of the modern magazine,
had begun in an uncertain fashion, of which the details are too complicated
for record here, nearly a hundred years before, and had continued ever
since with increasing vigor. The lapsing of the licensing laws in 1695 had
given a special impetus. Defoe's 'Review,' from 1704 to 1713, was devoted
to many interests, including politics, the Church and commerce. Steele's
'Tatler' at first likewise dealt in each number with several subjects, such
as foreign news, literary criticism, and morals, but his controlling
instinct to inculcate virtue and good sense more and more asserted itself.
The various departments were dated from the respective coffee-houses where
those subjects were chiefly discussed, Poetry from 'Will's,' Foreign and
Domestic News from 'St. James's,' and so on. The more didactic papers were
ascribed to an imaginary Isaac Bickerstaff, a nom-de-plume which Steele
borrowed from some of Swift's satires. Steele himself wrote two-thirds of
all the papers, but before proceeding far he accepted Addison's offer of
assistance and later he occasionally called in other contributors.

'The Tatler' appeared three times a week and ran for twenty-one months; it
came to an end shortly after the return of the Tories to power had deprived
Steele and Addison of some of their political offices. Its discontinuance
may have been due to weariness on Steele's part or, since it was Whig in
tone, to a desire to be done with partisan writing; at any rate, two months
later, in March, 1711, of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim, secured the
favor of the ministers of the day, and throughout almost all the rest of
his life he held important political places, some even, thanks to Swift,
during the period of Tory dominance. During his last ten years he was a
member of Parliament; but though he was a delightful conversationalist in a
small group of friends, he was unable to speak in public.

Addison's great fame as 'The Spectator' was increased when in 1713 he
brought out the play 'Cato,' mostly written years before. This is a
characteristic example of the pseudo-classical tragedies of which a few
were produced during the first half of the eighteenth century. They are the
stiffest and most lifeless of all forms of pseudo-classical literature;
Addison, for his part, attempts not only to observe the three unities, but
to follow many of the minor formal rules drawn up by the French critics,
and his plot, characterization, and language are alike excessively pale and
frigid. Paleness and frigidity, however, were taken for beauties at the
time, and the moral idea of the play, the eulogy of Cato's devotion to
liberty in his opposition to Caesar, was very much in accord with the
prevailing taste, or at least the prevailing affected taste. Both political
parties loudly claimed the work as an expression of their principles, the
Whigs discovering in Caesar an embodiment of arbitrary government like that
of the Tories, the Tories declaring him a counterpart of Marlborough, a
dangerous plotter, endeavoring to establish a military despotism. 'Cato,'
further, was a main cause of a famous quarrel between Addison and Pope.
Addison, now recognized as the literary dictator of the age, had greatly
pleased Pope, then a young aspirant for fame, by praising his 'Essay on
Criticism,' and Pope rendered considerable help in the final revision of
'Cato.' When John Dennis, a rather clumsy critic, attacked the play, Pope
came to its defense with a reply written in a spirit of railing bitterness
which sprang from injuries of his own. Addison, a real gentleman, disowned
the defense, and this, with other slights suffered or imagined by Pope's
jealous disposition, led to estrangement and soon to the composition of
Pope's very clever and telling satire on Addison as 'Atticus,' which Pope
did not publish, however, until he included it in his 'Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot,' many years after Addison's death.

The few remaining years of Addison's life were rather unhappy. He married
the widowed Countess of Warwick and attained a place in the Ministry as one
of the Secretaries of State; but his marriage was perhaps incompatible and
his quarrel with Steele was regrettable. He died in 1719 at the age of only
forty-seven, perhaps the most generally respected and beloved man of his
time. On his deathbed, with a somewhat self-conscious virtue characteristic
both of himself and of the period, he called his stepson to come and 'see
in what peace a Christian could die.'

'The Tatler' and the more important 'Spectator' accomplished two results of
main importance: they developed the modern essay as a comprehensive and
fluent discussion of topics of current interest; and they performed a very
great service in elevating the tone of English thought and life. The later
'Tatlers' and all the 'Spectators' dealt, by diverse methods, with a great
range of themes--amusements, religion, literature, art, dress, clubs,
superstitions, and in general all the fashions and follies of the time. The
writers, especially Addison, with his wide and mature scholarship, aimed to
form public taste. But the chief purpose of the papers, professedly, was
'to banish Vice and Ignorance' (though here also, especially in Steele's
papers, the tone sometimes seems to twentieth-century readers far from
unexceptionable). When the papers began to appear, in spite of some
weakening of the Restoration spirit, the idea still dominated, or was
allowed to appear dominant, that immorality and lawlessness were the proper
marks of a gentleman. The influence of the papers is thus summarized by the
poet Gray: 'It would have been a jest, some time since, for a man to have
asserted that anything witty could be said in praise of a married state or
that Devotion and Virtue were in any way necessary to the character of a
fine gentleman.... Instead of complying with the false sentiments or
vicious tastes of the age he [Steele] has boldly assured them that they
were altogether in the wrong.... It is incredible to conceive the effect
his writings have had upon the Town; how many thousand follies they have
either quite banished or given a very great check to! how much countenance
they have added to Virtue and Religion! how many people they have rendered
happy by showing them it was their own faults if they were not so.'

An appeal was made, also, to women no less than to men. During the previous
period woman, in fashionable circles, had been treated as an elegant toy,
of whom nothing was expected but to be frivolously attractive. Addison and
Steele held up to her the ideal of self-respecting intellectual development
and of reasonable preparation for her own particular sphere.

The great effectiveness of 'The Spectator's' preaching was due largely to
its tactfulness. The method was never violent denunciation, rather gentle
admonition, suggestion by example or otherwise, and light or humorous
raillery. Indeed, this almost uniform urbanity and good-nature makes the
chief charm of the papers. Their success was largely furthered, also, by
the audience provided in the coffee-houses, virtually eighteenth century
middle-class clubs whose members and points of view they primarily
addressed.

The external style has been from the first an object of unqualified and
well-merited praise. Both the chief authors are direct, sincere, and
lifelike, and the many short sentences which they mingle with the longer,
balanced, ones give point and force. Steele is on the whole somewhat more
colloquial and less finished, Addison more balanced and polished, though
without artificial formality. Dr. Johnson's repeatedly quoted description
of the style can scarcely be improved on--'familiar but not coarse, and
elegant but not ostentatious.'

It still remains to speak of one particular achievement of 'The Spectator,'
namely the development of the character-sketch, accomplished by means of
the series of De Coverly papers, scattered at intervals among the others.
This was important because it signified preparation for the modern novel
with its attention to character as well as action. The character-sketch as
a distinct form began with the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, of the
third century B. C., who struck off with great skill brief humorous
pictures of typical figures--the Dissembler, the Flatterer, the Coward, and
so on. This sort of writing, in one form or another, was popular in France
and England in the seventeenth century. From it Steele, and following him
Addison, really derived the idea for their portraits of Sir Roger, Will
Honeycomb, Will Wimble, and the other members of the De Coverly group; but
in each case they added individuality to the type traits. Students should
consider how complete the resulting characterizations are, and in general
just what additions and changes in all respects would be needed to
transform the De Coverly papers into a novel of the nineteenth century
type.

ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744. The chief representative of pseudo-classicism in
its most particular field, that of poetry, is Dryden's successor, Alexander
Pope.

Pope was born in 1688 (just a hundred years before Byron), the son of a
Catholic linen-merchant in London. Scarcely any other great writer has ever
had to contend against such hard and cruel handicaps as he. He inherited a
deformed and dwarfed body and an incurably sickly constitution, which
carried with it abnormal sensitiveness of both nerves and mind. Though he
never had really definite religious convictions of his own, he remained all
his life formally loyal to his parents' faith, and under the laws of the
time this closed to him all the usual careers of a gentleman. But he was
predestined by Nature to be a poet. Brought up chiefly at the country home
near Windsor to which his father had retired, and left to himself for
mental training, he never acquired any thoroughness of knowledge or power
of systematic thought, but he read eagerly the poetry of many languages. He
was one of the most precocious of the long list of precocious versifiers;
his own words are: 'I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.' The
influences which would no doubt have determined his style in any case were
early brought to a focus in the advice given him by an amateur poet and
critic, William Walsh. Walsh declared that England had had great poets,
'but never one great poet that was correct' (that is of thoroughly regular
style). Pope accepted this hint as his guiding principle and proceeded to
seek correctness by giving still further polish to the pentameter couplet
of Dryden.

At the age of twenty-one, when he was already on familiar terms with
prominent literary men, he published some imitative pastorals, and two
years later his 'Essay on Criticism.' This work is thoroughly
representative both of Pope and of his period. In the first place the
subject is properly one not for poetry but for expository prose. In the
second place the substance is not original with Pope but is a restatement
of the ideas of the Greek Aristotle, the Roman Horace, especially of the
French critic Boileau, who was Pope's earlier contemporary, and of various
other critical authorities, French and English. But in terse and
epigrammatic expression of fundamental or pseudo-classical principles of
poetic composition and criticism the 'Essay' is amazingly brilliant, and it
shows Pope already a consummate master of the couplet. The reputation which
it brought him was very properly increased by the publication the next year
of the admirable mock-epic 'The Rape of the Lock,' which Pope soon
improved, against Addison's advice, by the delightful 'machinery' of the
Rosicrucian sylphs. In its adaptation of means to ends and its attainment
of its ends Lowell has boldly called this the most successful poem in
English. Pope now formed his lifelong friendship with Swift (who was twice
his age), with Bolingbroke, and other distinguished persons, and at
twenty-five or twenty-six found himself acknowledged as the chief man of
letters in England, with a wide European reputation.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.