remark, Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.' The Windsor Prophecy, Fable of Midas, and Legion Club are fierce and polemical. The Journal of a Modern Lady and Lady's Dressing Room embody his growing preoccupation with filth and decay in their relations to human life. Swift has left a good deal of easy occasional verse. His most celebrated poem is Cadenus and Vanessa (1713) which tells the tale of the ill-fated infatuation conceived for him by Hester Vanhomrigh. The prose Journal to Stella (1710-13) stands apart among Swift's writings. It was written from London, during the height of his connexion with the Tory leaders, to Esther Johnson, the woman whom he loved, yet, according to the best account, never married. It is a remarkable picture both of his life and hers, and of English politics and politicians. But for many its main interest lies in its revelation of the tenderness which could find place in Swift's haughty and savage soul. Swift, as has been stated above, is beyond all reasonable His place doubt the greatest prose satirist in our language; and his among satire, as the foregoing survey has shown, is an utterly different Satirists. thing from that of either Steele or Addison. Both of these, in their several ways, had a kindly feeling for the men and women who were the objects of their ridicule or blame; and their kindliness is never far to seek in their writings. Such a feeling, as we know from Swift's life, was strong in his nature; but it is seldom explicit in his writings, which are constantly kindled and made terrible by the will to destroy. Yet his scorn is an utterly different thing from the cold and acrid cynicism under which some writers have disguised their lack of heart it is winged with passion, and is the outcome of a great idealism warped and foiled. Swift is a fierce angel, but he is not a lost or fallen one. Swift, Steele, Addison, and perhaps Defoe, occupy a place apart in the prose of the period. Prominent among the rest was John Arbuthnot, High Tory, Court Physician to Queen ArbuthAnne, and close friend of Pope, who addressed to him one of not. his most spirited verse epistles. Like Pope and Swift, he was a member of the Scriblerus Club, and as a result of this connexion he wrote the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a collection of satires ridiculing all the false tastes in learning'. He has left much miscellaneous writing; but his most famous work is certainly that racy political satire, the History of John Bull. He has much of Swift's wit and irony, yet he wielded these with a difference. He justified Thackeray's description of him as one of the wisest, wittiest, most accomplished, gentlest of mankind'. More of Swift's bitterness appears in the writings of another Bolingof his friends, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678- broke. 1751), the great Tory statesman. At different periods during his stormy career he founded political journals, and con tributed freely to them. He wrote extensively on history and politics: left some instructive correspondence, inspired Shaftesbury. Berkeley. Joseph Pope's Essay on Man through his philosophical speculations, and, in A Letter to Sir William Wyndham, has given the world a disingenuous but readable apologia. His Idea of a Patriot King-a king who besides reigning, governs wisely and in his people's interest-was widely read in its day, and has had some effect on later political thought, including Disraeli's. The eager, fiery quality of Bolingbroke's nature passes into his best prose, and gives it eloquence and a certain splendoura splendour which seldom reaches sublimity. His writing is lucid and spirited, yet rarely profound. For all his qualities he leaves one with a strange sense of disappointment. In philosophy and theology, the age produced some notable writers. Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713), third Earl of Shaftesbury and grandson of Achitophel', published his miscellaneous writings in 1711, under the title Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Throughout these he showed strong leanings toward Deism, and also strove to prove that the self-regarding principle of human conduct was reconcilable with the spirit of self-sacrifice. Shaftesbury's thought, though keen, is not of the first order his style has the right eighteenth-century lucidity, but is mannered and over-polished. Greater than Shaftesbury, both in thought and style, is George Berkeley (1685-1753), one of the very first among English philosophers. From the metaphysical standpoint his chief works are his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), in which he starts from Locke's standpoint, but subsequently transcends it, proving that matter has no existence apart from idea, and maintaining the existence of an omnipresent eternal Mind which knows and comprehends all things and exhibits them to our view in such a manner and according to such rules as He Himself hath ordained, and are by us termed laws of Nature'. In Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), he confutes the Deists, and others of the unorthodox, with remarkable grace, brilliancy, and force. His Hylas, also a dialogue, is more positive, and sets forth some of his main philosophic principles. Siris (1744) contains his celebrated testimony to the healing virtues of tar-water; but besides prescribing for this for the body, it prescribes idealism for the soul, and shows an increasing mysticism of outlook. Berkeley's style is not only clear and forcible, but possesses a delicacy and beauty all too rare in English philosophical writing. His use of irony in Alciphron is superb. The earnestness and charm of his writings give him the same sway over his readers that he exerted in the flesh over his friends. Among the chief religious writers of the period are Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham (1692-1752), and William Law (1686-1761). Butler's best-known work is The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736); but there is also much stimulating thought in his Fifteen Sermons (1726). Lacking Berkeley's gift of style, Butler comes little short of him in intellectual profundity. Law is best known by his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), a book of great power and charm, which has profoundly affected many generations of Englishmen and has set its mark on thinkers so diverse as Charles Wesley and Samuel Johnson. Some of Law's most remarkable work was written during the latter part of his life, after he had come beneath the influence of the German mystic, Jacob Boehme. Of lesser note are Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), philosopher Lesser and theologian; that highly unorthodox divine, Conyers Prose Middleton (1683-1750); and Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Writers Rochester (1662-1732), scholar, critic, and friend and fellowclubman of Swift and Pope. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), though far from religious himself, was the cause of much religious activity in others. His cynical Fable of the Bees (1723), which in its final form is part verse, part prose, brought replies from Hutcheson, Berkeley, Law, and others. The main critical theories of the day have already been Critics. discussed in relation to their greater exponents. With these, as with lesser men, there was commonly an exaggerated reverence for classical example, frequently combined with a tendency to disparage preceding English poetry for its 'incorrectness' and failure to comply with the classical model. The reductio ad absurdum of all this may be found in the Short View of Tragedy (1692) of Thomas Rymer, in which Shakespeare is tried at the bar of correctness' and found guilty on several counts. Only slightly more discriminating is John Dennis, who, in his Essay on Shakespeare (1712), asserts that if Shakespeare 'had had the advantage of art and learning, he would have surpassed the very best and strongest of the Ancients'. Dennis has erudition and a certain force, and occasionally shows critical acumen. In some of Pope's most scornful lines, he is coupled with Charles Gildon, author of a book on The English Dramatic Poets (1691), to whom he is certainly superior. The greatest triumphs of Richard Bentley (1662-1742) were won in the field of classical scholar- Bentley. ship, and he was one of the greatest men who ever entered that field. His interest for ourselves lies chiefly in his controversial writings, which include his Dissertation (1699) on the so-called Epistles of Phalaris, and his Remarks on the Discourse of Freethinking of Anthony Collins. Bentley writes strong trenchant English, and his great learning gives his treatises dignity and weight. It was unfortunate for his contemporary reputation that he incurred the wrath of the two most terrible satirists of his day-Swift, who attacked him in the Battle of the Books, and Pope, who made him the 'hero' of the Fourth Book of the Dunciad. The most unfortunate thing he ever did was to edit Paradise Lost as if it were a classical text, and to 'improve' it with his own emendations. We may pass from him to his chief castigator. Pope's Anne poetry — Prior, Gay, Young — Minors. ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744) from boyhood had set his heart on literary glory, and had tried to fit himself for its achieveWritings. ment by diligent reading and writing. Though his own testimony regarding the details of his life is in general untrustworthy, there is little exaggeration in his famous profession : As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came. The trend of his youthful genius was moulded by the greater genius of Dryden, for whom he expressed the deepest admiration and reverence. He had read widely in English, French, and classical literature, achieving his knowledge of Homer and Ovid partly at first hand, partly through the translations of Ogilby and Sandys. His first essays in poetry found favour with the judicious: Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh would tell me I could write. In 1709 he published in Tonson's Miscellany the Pastorals of Like gentle Fanny's was my flowery theme, These poems were doubtless suggested by Nature, as Pope had seen her in the pleasant home of his boyhood at Binfield; but if we may judge from his references to her, he was not profoundly stirred by her beauty, as Milton and Wordsworth in their youthful verse show themselves to have been stirred by a similar sojourn. These poems are prentice work, and are chiefly noticeable for their metrical smoothness and perfection, and for certain passages of pleasant fancy. More notable is The Essay his Essay on Criticism, written when he was twenty-one, and on Criti- published in 1711. This work contains little original thought, cism. The Rape of the Lock being largely an exhortation to follow the classics, in the sense prescribed by Boileau, Le Bossu, and their English followers; but it is of value as showing what the age of reason meant by poetry and by poetry's concomitants, 'nature', 'wit', 'understanding', and the rules'. Pope's heroic couplet is here polished, incisive, and antithetical, though it has not achieved the happy colloquialism of his later work. Windsor Forest (1713) has some fine descriptive passages, and represents a great advance on the earlier Pastorals. In 1712 Pope published the first draft of The Rape of the Lock, a poem celebrating in light and spirited mock-heroic verse the exploit of a certain Lord Petre, who had cut a lock from the In 1717 Pope published two poems, the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard, which represent an element of passion and romance very rare in his work. The Elegy deals with a subject similar to that of Swinburne's beautiful Choriambics-the suicide of a young and beautiful woman. Such romantic intensity as inspires this poem and Eloisa has seldom been achieved in the end-stopped couplet. Pope had now achieved the literary glory which he so eagerly His desired. Addison and Swift, the greatest of living English Homer. writers, had recognized his genius, and had admitted him as wellnigh their equal: he had either gained, or was on the way to gain, the friendship of Oxford, Bolingbroke, Atterbury, Arbuthnot, Peterborough, and other leading men of the day. This popularity was turned to practical account through the publication of his translation of the Iliad (1715-20), to which everybody of importance in England subscribed. This book. brought him an increase both of money and fame. It was a daring thing for one knowing but little Greek to think of translating Homer at all; and it was hardly less daring for such a one to choose the end-stopped rhyming couplet as the equivalent of the Homeric hexameter. This metre could never be adopted for an epic in an age which, like our own, had been familiarized with the freely over-run couplets of Tristram of Lyonesse, or with the longer and more swinging couplets of Sigurd the Volsung. Pope's version is neither Homer nor is it magnificent. It lacks the simplicity so justly postulated by Matthew Arnold as an essential of good Homeric translation, and it lacks, too, the speed and fire which constantly inspire Chapman's version. Yet it has been greatly praised by great men, and possesses both vigour and distinction. Less excellent, and less successful, is his translation of the Odyssey, in which he was helped by Fenton and Broome. Pope's early works, as we have seen, had brought him repu- The tation: his Homer gave him supremacy. But his success had Dunciad. made him many enemies, especially among the Grub Street critics of the day; and against these, and his rivals, he directed his next work, The Dunciad (1728). This great and terrible satire originally consisted of three books, and took for its' hero Theobald, who had published an edition of Shakespeare that challenged Pope's, and in the opinion of posterity, has surpassed it. Later, a fourth book was added, with Bentley for its butt. |