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Robert

son.

Gibbon.

reason as the basis of morality. The scepticism, and the weakness, of Hume's position were due to his omission of the intellectual element presupposed in experience. But he restated the fundamental problems of philosophy in prose of admirable dignity and clearness, and greatly influenced succeeding philosophic speculation. English philosophic empiricism derives from him, and he occasioned, by reaction, much of the profoundest German idealistic speculation. Outside philosophy, his greatest work is his History of England (1754-61). He began this with the reign of James I, and worked backwards from that date to the origins, and forward to the Revolution. He had always had the deepest antipathy for the Whig Party, and for the English, whom he believed to have leagued together to destroy everything Scottish. This prejudice defaces his History, especially the earlier part of it, which he rewrote with the view of removing from it any 'villainous seditious Whig strokes', and 'plaguy prejudices of Whiggism' which it might contain. Despite this drawback, Hume's history, is important, through its comprehensiveness, its grasp of social problems, and its powerful, polished, and frequently satirical style. He was certainly one of the most powerful intellects of the eighteenth century.

A more fair-minded, though less great, historian was Hume's friend, William Robertson (1721-1793), who published his History of Scotland in 1758-9, and his masterpiece, the History of the Reign of Charles V, in 1769. Horace Walpole declared the first of these works to be the best modern history', and, perhaps with greater reason, congratulated the author on the purity of his English. From a strictly historical point of view, both of these books are now antiquated; but Robertson's shrewdness and depth of judgment, no less than his undoubted gift of style, make him a notable figure in literary history.

A greater historian than either of these, the greatest, indeed, in the language, was Edward Gibbon (1737-1794).__His monumental work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was projected in 1764, but the first volume was not published till 1776, and it was only in 1788 that the three last volumes were sent to press. The History covers the centuries between the period of the Antonines (the 2nd century B. C.), and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in A. D. 1453. Gibbon's outstanding merits as a historian are his prodigious industry in the preparation of his material; his power of fashioning that material into lucid and harmonious narrative, informed by a great central idea; and his style, weighty, antithetical, and of gorgeous colour, especially admirable for description, but passing easily into reflection, and into a weighty and terribly effective form of satire. This last quality - the

solemn sneer' noted in him by Byron-is prominent in the attack on Christianity embodied in the famous conclusion to his first volume. Gibbon's style, at once strongly personal and strongly coloured by his age, is one of the greatest, though

not one of the purest, in the English tongue. Of his supremacy as a historian, we may allow his fellow-historian, Mr. Freeman, to speak: That Gibbon should ever be displaced seems impossible. That wonderful man monopolized, so to speak, the historical genius and the historical learning of a whole generation, and left little, indeed, of either for his contemporaries. He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside. We may correct and improve from the stores which have been opened since Gibbon's time. We may write again large parts of his story from other and oftentimes more wholesome points of view; but the work of Gibbon as a whole, as the encyclopaedic history of 1,300 years, as the grandest of historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power and accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too.'

Of lesser importance than his history, but of perennial fascination, is Gibbon's posthumously published Autobiography.

The true greatness of Adam Smith (1723-1790) lies in other Adam fields than the literary, but he merits mention here owing to Smith and the admirably clear and forcible style of his two chief works, William A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Enquiry into the Godwin. Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The profound effect which this last volume has had upon our national life is not matter for our present inquiry. If a writer's greatness could be gauged solely by the effect he has exercised on his contemporaries, William Godwin (1756-1836) would certainly rank very high among the writers of the period. His novels are mentioned elsewhere in this volume. In 1793 he published his most important work, An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, which embodied many of the ideas implicit in the French Revolution, and added many of Godwin's own. He believed that all the ills of humanity, including sickness, social inequality, murder, and conjugal incompatibility, could be cured by an appeal to reason. As is noted elsewhere, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, were all, in varying extent and for varying periods, influenced by Godwin. His style is lucid and flexible, but he has no humour and little passion. He wrote extensively in many literary kinds, publishing plays, histories and biographies which need not concern us here.

Many of the best letters of this period have been written Lady by authors eminent in other kinds, and have been discussed Mary in relation to their general work; but certain writers who Wortley survive solely or mainly by their correspondence may be Montagu. considered separately here. The early letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, dealing with her courtship and her runaway match with Edward Wortley Montagu, throw a curious light on the position of women at this period. More interesting are those which describe her journey across Europe to Constantinople, and her sojourn in that city, where her husband had

Chester

field.

been appointed ambassador. Some of the letters written thence contain admirable descriptions of her life and surroundings; others display her insatiable love of reading. Sometimes she writes to Pope, who subsequently became her implacable enemy. The best letters of her last years are written to her daughter, Lady Bute, and display a pleasing affection.

A different picture of the time may be found in the letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield. The first series of these were written to his natural son, Philip Stanhope, the second to his godson, who bore the same name. Chesterfield has suffered with posterity for two reasons : Johnson, whom he slighted on a famous occasion, has described the letters in a phrase which is as famous as it is unjust; and Dickens, by caricaturing him as Sir John Chester in Barnaby Rudge, has certainly given an unfair impression of his personal character. The letters are, indeed, of the world, worldly, but they contain much advice which is both prudent and moral; and if in certain essentials their teaching seems lax and cynical, we must make great allowance for the spirit of the time. It is only fair to Chesterfield, moreover, to remember that the letters were never intended for publication. In style they possess the classic qualities of elegance, wit, and charm. Horace If Chesterfield was an artist in letter-writing, Horace Walpole Walpole. (1717-1797) was both artist and genius. From early manhood onward he loved writing to his friends, and three thousand and sixty-one of his letters have been preserved in Mrs. Toynbee's edition. His correspondents include some of the most brilliant personalities of the day. Chief among them were Thomas Gray, Richard West, Sir Horace Mann, Henry Conway, George Selwyn, George Montagu, and the Countess of Upper Ossory. In his early manhood he had taken an active part in politics, and, to the end, his letters display his interest in European affairs. Thus we find him commenting on Fontenoy, Minden, Ticonderoga, the execution of the Jacobite rebels, and, towards the end of his life, on the French Revolution and the disappointment it had caused his hopes. At other times he writes of books, or of his recurrent ill-health, or of the fresh treasures which he had added to his beautiful pleasure-house at Strawberry Hill; or he dispatches from his town house in Arlington Street the bon-mots and scandal of London society, often with malicious additions and comments. Walpole's epistolary style is intimate and playful, and there is a pleasant, familiar homage in his letters to women. Beneath his foppish attitude toward life there were undoubted qualities both of heart and judgment. If to be supremely readable is a sign of genius, we must accord him the quality.

1 For fairer estimates of him as man and writer, see the Preface to the Earl of Carnarvon's edition of his letters to his godson, and Mr. H. B. Wheatley's chapter on him in vol. x of the Cambridge History of English Literature.

Walpole's letters were written to his private friends; but Junius. the Letters of Junius were intended for publication, and appeared in the Public Advertiser during a period extending from January 21, 1769, to January 21, 1772. Their authorship is still uncertain, but has been attributed at different times to over forty people, including Burke, Chatham, Chesterfield, Grattan, and Horace Walpole. It seems likely, on the evidence, that they were written by Sir Philip Francis, a civil servant who became notorious as the opponent of Warren Hastings, and subsequently sat in the House of Commons in the Whig interest. They were intended to bring about the fall of the Duke of Grafton's Ministry, and contain venomous attacks on him, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Mansfield, and others. The best modern criticism would not attribute to the Letters the importance attached to them by Burke and Johnson. Junius had evidently studied Bolingbroke carefully, and his style also shows the influence of Tacitus; yet beside Burke he is a journalist, and what seems his strength is too often mere violence.

CHAPTER XXV

THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE

Form and spirit of eighteenth-century poetry

and minors romance

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Thomson, Shenstone,

- New forces - Gray, Collins, Cowper - The revival of Ossian, Percy Scottish Poetry: Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns Crabbe, Blake.

THE spirit of the eighteenth century, as we have defined it, Eigh had been particularly favourable to certain kinds of literature, teenthto the society verse, for instance, employed after such different century and inimitable fashions by Prior, Gay, and by Pope in The Poetry. Rape of the Lock, and to that fierce guardian of refined and sensitive civilization, satire, which in the prose of Jonathan Swift had achieved an almost lyric fervour and intensity. In poetry, whether philosophic, satirical or playful, an elegant simplicity and colloquial ease of diction had almost come to be regarded as the supreme literary quality, so that, for all their fundamental differences, there are strange and startling points of contact between the respective theories of poetry formulated by Pope and by Wordsworth.

Convenient as is the distinction between classicism and romanticism, much harm has been done by sweeping and exclusive use of the terms, and we might point to many passages of Parnell and of Pope himself as being 'romantic in the full modern sense. And though the so-called 'movement' only attained full strength and consciousness with the birth of the nineteenth century, it was already alive in the germ, and in something more than the germ, by the middle of the eighteenth century. The literary quality, indeed, generally

James

Seasons.

attached to the term 'eighteenth century', would more fitly apply to the first half only of that century, and to the latter half of the seventeenth.

The acute sensitiveness, for instance, to natural beauty, which is a main mark of English_romanticism, is already visible in the Hermit and The Night Piece on Death of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718), and is still more marked in The Seasons (1726-30) of James Thomson (1700-1748). This poem, like Thomson Young's Night Thoughts, deserts the couplet for blank verse, -The and thus metrically prepares the way for Cowper and Wordsworth. Its sincere love of nature is sometimes, though by no means always, marred by the conventional diction of the age, and the poem is of greater importance in the history of poetry than as poetry itself. Yet there is much in it which gives permanent delight, and if Thomson did not anticipate Wordsworth as an interpreter of Nature, he certainly did anticipate his precept that the first step towards such interpretation was close and loving observation. It has been said of him that he is over-fond of those generalized descriptions which were common in his age; but in point of fact, one of his chief faults is a tendency to catalogue Nature's charms, to portray her photographically and without transfiguring vision. Such a tendency is evident in his descriptions of the flowers of Spring, and of haymaking in Autumn; but there are real power and spirit in many of his descriptions, as in that of the thunderstorm in Summer, and of the interior of earth in Autumn. More than once he apostrophizes Nature, and he frequently appeals to the Power which created her. His pantheism sometimes has a Wordsworthian air, but in reality it is vague and conventional, and possesses no intensity of revelation. The greatness of The Seasons-for great the poem undoubtedly is-depends on Thomson's keen delight in the external shows of Nature, and in his frequently admirable handling of blank verse. These excellences are all the more praiseworthy in that they had little warrant from the fashion of the age.

The

Indolence.

In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson, as if by an Castle of unconscious impulse towards Romanticism, again deserts the couplet, this time using the Spenserian stanza, and thus foreshadowing Keats, Shelley, and Byron. His stanza has almost always the ease and flow which are at once essential to this form, and infrequent with its minor practitioners; but this metrical facility is often compassed only by the forcing of words into strange senses and contexts, and Thomson's archaisms, unlike Spenser's, seem unsuccessfully blended with the fabric of the poem. The allegory is somewhat thin and unconvincing; the slothful and pleasure-loving poet could hardly have hailed with sincerity the victory won by the Knight of Arts and Industry over the enchanter Indolence, but in many passages of the poem there are delightful fancy and charm. Thomson is seen at his best in the description

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