admit for genuine poetry, if disguised by a thin mask of orthodoxy, a kind of writing which reminds us of Pope's Dissonance and captious art, And snip-snap short and misconceptions smart, And major, minor, and conclusion quick. Indeed, if Young is not capable of a noble melancholy, he is in a thoroughly bilious condition. This preacher among the tombs cannot rival the grim pathos of Hamlet with Yorick's skull; but he could have turned as many epigrams about it as would have thoroughly astonished the gravediggers, and excited the envy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. If he cannot show Lorenzo heaven and hell, the angels harping in unexpressive quire,' and the devils defying the Almighty despot from the ocean of fire, he can fairly triumph over him when he exclaims Hence a fifth proof arises, stronger still; for poor Lorenzo is not allowed to have an innings-otherwise he might have remarked that a poet who no longer sees, but argues, has ceased to be either poetical or convincing. Young's parody of Othello,' called 'Revenge,' is a curious illustration of the view taken of the Shakesperean drama by the poets of the eighteenth century; and his satires, called The Love of Fame,' are a proof, to anyone who needs it, that something more than extreme cleverness was necessary to give to Pope's writings their enduring brilliance. And yet Young has talent enough to have made a mark in any age as a writer of the second order. 40. Akenside is a man of very different stamp. A certain force and dignity of thought is perceptible beneath a rather cumbrous style; he is prompted to write by a full mind instead of an empty purse. He has a certain message to deliver to mankind, and the difficulty of his utterance is characteristic. For, in fact, he is wrestling with the difficulty which perplexed Pope in the Essay on Man.' He has to make bricks without straw; to turn a philosophical system into poetry without the help of any symbolic imagery except a few hollow abstractions such as the Genius of the Human Race, Happiness, Virtue, and Remorse. The vision in which these personages appear and declare their sentiments with amiable frankness displeased Akenside himself in later years, and he swept them away in recasting his poem, to be able to philosophise at his ease. The doctrine which Akenside undertook to expound had some natural charms for a poet. He stood in nearly the same relation to Shaftesbury which Pope occupied to Bolingbroke, though the inspiration was less direct, and the coincidence not so close. Parts of this philosophy the doctrine especially that ridicule is the test of truth-were as little suited for poetical treatment as can well be imagined. But the general theory, the identification of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the belief in an allpervading harmony revealing itself to the purified intellect, was calculated to generate a poetical philosophy, if not a philosophical poetry. Akenside says that the separation of philosophy from the imagination has been an injury to both; and congratulates himself on their closer approximation in recent years. At the time of the Revolution, he says, Locke was at the head of one party, Dryden at the head of the other. Now poets have taken to 'subjects of importance to society; and philosophy must borrow of their embellishments, in order even to gain an audience with the public.' It would not be very easy to translate these generalities into particular instances; but the sentiment is characteristic. Akenside judged well in desiring a harmony between poetry and philosophy; but the attempt at a fusion was unfortunate. His formulas suffered a fate analogous to that of his master's writings. The rather stilted style and not very lucid thought have in both cases rendered the difficulty of penetrating to the real thought too great for cursory readers; and a poet suffers more than a philosopher for wrapping his meaning in sententious obscurity. 41. Thomson and Young had each their followers, though I do not know that anybody imitated more than the title of Akenside's poetry. Blair's 'Grave' is a kind of corollary to Young's Night Thoughts;' Mallet's 'Excursion' and Savage's 'Wanderer' are attempts to follow Thomson; and perhaps we might put in the same class such poems as Falconer's Shipwreck,' Somerville's 'Chase,' or Dyer's 'Fleece,' See argument of Book ii. on the first form, and note. so highly praised by Wordsworth. The second-rate performances are dead, while even the best have but a feeble vitality. The general source of weakness is abundantly evident. The philosophy and the passions of an age should be projected into concrete symbols by the poetical imagination. But the passions were too cool, and the philosophy too abstract and frigid to be capable of symbolic representation. Nothing remained but didactic, or rather argumentative poetry, in which the feeble machinery' of mere abstractions, galvanised into some faint semblance of vitality by the free use of capital letters, mere shadows of shades, phantasmal images of ghosts long since laid, wandered dreamily through the mazes of consciously constructed allegories. No wonder that such a poetry gradually collapsed, after feebly trying to support itself above the solid ground of prose by help of an inflated phraseology. As the philosophy itself ceased to be interesting after the middle of the century, the poetry, which was but the philosophy versified, decayed still more rapidly, and expired altogether at the first touch of real passion. There are still imitations of Pope's satires, some of them of considerable force; there are some ponderous attempts at epics and classical drama by Glover, Wilkie, and Mason; but the didactic or philosophical poetry becomes extinct. Two poets, indeed, of very remarkable quality, may be regarded as in some sense belonging to the earlier school. The exquisite felicities of Gray's 'Elegy' and Goldsmith's Traveller' and 'Deserted Village' show the true polish desired by the disciples of the correct school. But Gray is more than half romantic in his temperament; and Goldsmith is deeply tinged with the sentimentalism of Rousseau. The influence of the older canons of taste is chiefly perceptible in diminishing the productiveness and stimulating the fastidious taste of these two admirable poets. IV. GENERAL LITERATURE. 42. There is, however, another wide province of literature in which writers of the eighteenth century did work original in character and of permanent value. If the seventeenth century is the great age of dramatists and theologians, the eighteenth century was the age in which the critic, the essayist, the satirist, the novelist, and the moralist first appeared, or reached the highest mark. Criticism, though still in its infancy, first became an independent art with Addison. Addison and his various colleagues set the first example of that kind of social essay which is still popular. Satire had been practised in the preceding century, and in the hands of Dryden had become a formidable political weapon; but the social satire of which Pope was, and remains, the chief master, began with the century, and may be said to have expired with it, in spite of the efforts of Byron and Gifford. De Foe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett developed the modern novel out of very crude rudiments; and two of the greatest men of the century, Swift and Johnson, may be best described as practical moralists in a vein peculiar to the time. I have already pointed out, more than once, that the causes of the great development of this kind of literature must be sought chiefly in social conditions. The rise of a class of comparatively educated and polished persons, large enough to form a public, and not so large as to degenerate into a mob, distinct from the old feudal nobility, and regarding the life of the nobles with a certain contempt as rustic and brutal, more refined again than that class of hangers-on to the Court, of merchants and shopkeepers stamped with the peculiarities of their business, which generated the drama of the Restoration, and, on another side, beginning to despise the pedants of colleges and cathedrals as useless and antiquated encumbrances, accounts for many of the most obvious phenomena of the time. After the long struggle of the end of the preceding century, the society called 'the Town' in the language of the essayists, definitely emerges, and is inclined to identify itself with the nation. Poets, novelists, essayists, and satirists consult its tastes, and consider Temple Bar as the centre of the universe. What are the characteristics in its intellectual relations of the literature which emerges? 43. Three tendencies, strongly marked in all this crowd of writers, may be noticed as sufficiently indicative of the contemporary modes of thought. The first is a speculative, the second an ethical, and the third an æsthetic tendency. They are intimately connected, and may be plausibly deduced from the working of the dominant ideas which have been expounded in previous chapters. The first half of the century was a period of vehement discussion; the deists and their antagonists fought over questions of the deepest importance with an energy proportional to the interests at stake. But there is a tendency, strongly marked on both sides, which determines the limits of the controversy. Neither party wishes really to push matters to an extremity. The deists attack priestcraft with fierce hostility; but they do not wish to destroy theology. The priest once deprived of his exaggerated pretensions may be allowed to remain as a useful member of society, and the natural religion which is desired, is to be but a modified and emasculated version of the old creed. The orthodox, on the other hand, have no inclination to attack the vital principles of their opponents. They admit the duty of free thought; they claim to be thoroughgoing rationalists, and they only desire to embody the teaching of reason in the old formula. Both sides tacitly evade certain crucial questions. Even Butler refrains from searching into the fundamental difficulty; and Hume alone dares to suggest the logical answer. This kind of intellectual indolence is revealed in the sphere of direct controversy by a general superficiality and readiness to put up with flimsy theories; and it is naturally connected with the cardinal fact that, in attacking the religious theory of the time, the deists were not animated, like their French successors, by any decided discontent with the social order. They were not seriously persecuted, and did not wish to inflict serious injury. To keep the clergy well under the heel of parliamentary authority would describe the ultimate limit of their political aspirations, as in a philosophical sense they wished generally to preserve theology, whilst getting rid of the supernatural. In literature the same tendency is marked by a stronger feeling. The strongest intellects of the day perceived, or felt instinctively, that the tendency of the deist speculations was to undermine the whole social order, and to undermine it in the interests of a flimsy creed. To any man with a strong sense of the practical needs of the time, the deists appeared to be superficial theorists who were gratifying their vanity at the expense of the most important institutions. They were insisting upon asking questions which had better not be asked, |