Henry Fielding (Oxford Companion)

 Fielding, Henry (1707-54), the son of a lieutenant (who later became lieutenant general), born at Sharpham Park, the house of his maternal grandfather in Somerset. His mother died when he was 11, and when his father remarried Henry was sent to Eton. There he was happy, enjoyed his studies, and made lifelong friends of *Lyttelton, who was to become a generous future patron, and of *Pitt the elder. At 19 he attempted to elope with a beautiful heiress, but failing in this settled in London, determined to earn his living as a dramatist. Lady M. W. *Montagu, a distant cousin, encouraged him, and in 1728 at Drury Lane his play Love in Several Masques was successfully performed. In the same year he became a student of letters at Leiden, where he remained about 18 months, greatly enlarging his knowledge of classical literature. On his return to London he continued his energetic but precarious life as a dramatist, and between 1729 and 1737 wrote some 25 assorted  dramas, largely in the form of farce and satire, and including two adaptations of Molière, The Mock Doctor and The Miser. In 1730 three of his plays were performed: The Author's Farce, Rape upon Rape, a savage satire on the practices of the law, embodied in Justice Squeezum; and the most successful of all his dramas, *Tom Thumb (which was published in a revised form the following year as The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great), one of several extravagant burlesques modelled on Buckingham's *The Rehearsal, of the turgid fashionable tragedies of the day. *Hogarth designed the frontispiece, and a long and close friendship began. Don Quixote, a satire which is in part a tribute to *Cervantes, appeared in 1734. In the same year Fielding married Charlotte Cradock, who became his model for Sophia in *Tom Jones and for the heroine of Amelia, and with whom he enjoyed ten years of great happiness until her death. His improvidence led to long periods of considerable poverty, but he was greatly assisted at various periods of his life by his close and wealthy friend R. *Allen, who became, with Lyttleton, the model for Allworthy in Tom Jones. In 1736 Fielding took over the management of the New Theatre, for the opening of which he wrote the hightly successful satirical comedy Pasquin, which aimed at various religious and political targets, including electioneering abuses. But The Historical Register for 1736 was fiercer political satire than *Walpole's government would tolerate, and the Licensing Act of 1737, introducing censorship by the lord chamberlain, brought Fielding's career in the theatre to an end.

He entered the Middle Temple and began to read for the bar. In 1739-40 he wrote most of the columns of the *Champion, a satirical and anti-Jacobite journal. In 1740 he was called to the bar but his health began to fail and he suffered acutely from gout. In the same year Richardson's Pamela appeared and enjoyed tremendous popular success. In 1741 Fielding expressed his contempt in his pseudonymous parody An Apology for the Life of Mrs *Shamela Andrews. Meanwhile, because of increasing illness, he was unable to pursue his legal career with any consistency. Instead, in 1742, he produced The Adventures of *Joseph Andrews and His Friend, Mr Abraham Adams, for which he received from his publisher £185 11s. In 1743 his old friend *Garrick put on Fielding's The Wedding Day, and in the same year Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, which included *A Journey from This World to the Next and a ferocious satire, The Life and Death of *Jonathan Wild the Great. In 1744 he suffered a terrible blow in the death of his wife, and for a year or so he wrote little except a preface to his sister Sarah's novel *David Simple, and some journalism, particularly the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal. In 1746 he probably began The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, and in 1747 caused some scandal by marrying his wife's maid and friend Mary Daniel. With the aid of Lyttelton, he was appointed JP for Westminster in 1747 and once again joined battle, now from the inside, with legal corruption and the 'trading justices' who imposed and embezzled fines. In 1749 Tom Jones was enthusiastically received by the general public, if not by *Richardson, *Smollett, Dr *Johnson, and other literary figures. In the same year his legal jurisdiction was extended to the whole county of Middlesex, and he was made chairman of the quarter sessions of Westminster. From his court in Bow Street he continued his struggle against corruption and lawlessness and, with his blind half-brother and fellow magistrate Sir John Fielding, strove to establish new standards of honesty and competence on the bench. He wrote various influential legal enquiries and pamphlets, including a proposal for the abolition of public hangings. In 1751 he published Amelia, which sold the best of all his novels. He returned to journalism in 1752 with the *Covent Garden Journal, and published in 1753 a Provision for the Poor. He organized and saw successfully implemented a plan for breaking up the criminal gangs who were then flourishing in London. But his gout, asthma, and other afflictions were now so far advanced that he had to use crutches, and in 1754, in hope of improvement, he set off with his wife and one of his daughters for Portugal. *The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, published poshumously in 1755, describes in unsparing detail the departure and journey. He had prepared it for the press ('a novel without a Plot') before he died in Lisbon in October.

Fielding is generally agreed to be an innovating master of the highest originality. He himself believed he was 'the founder of a new province of writing,' and Sir Walter *Scott commended him for his 'high notions of the dignity of an art which he may be considered as having founded'. His three acknowledged masters were *Lucian, *Swift, and Cervantes. In breaking away from the epistolary method of his contemporary Richardson, and others, he devised what he described as 'comic epics in prose', which may be characterized as the first modern novels in English, leading straight to the works of *Dickens and *Thackeray. The standard biography is M. C. Battestin, Henry Fielding (1989). The standard edition is the Wesleyan Edition (1967- ) with 11 volumes printed as of 1997.

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Tom Thumb,  a Tragedy, a farce by Henry Fielding, performed and published 1730, and published in in a different version in 1731 under the title of The Tragedy of Tragedies, or, The Life and Death of Tom Thum the Great.
    The most successful of Fielding's many plays, this is an exuberant farce in the mock-heroic manner, ridiculing the 'Bombastic Greatness' of the fashionable grandiose tragedies of authors such as Nathaniel *Lee and James *Thomson, and similar in form to Buckingham's *The Rehearsal. It was published with a heavy apparatus of absurd scholarly notes, and a frontispiece by *Hogarth. *Swift declared that he had laughed only twice in his life, once at a Merry-Andrew and once at a performance of Tom Thumb.


A Journey from This World to The Next, the second volume of Miscellanies, by Henry *Fielding, published 1743.
    The author purports to have found an almost indecipherable manuscript, consisting of a series of 'Epistles', which was left in an attic by someone now departed to the West Indies. The soul leaves the body in its lodgings in Cheapside and finds itself, guided by Mercury, in a stage-coach with other departing souls. They pass through the City of Diseases and past the black marble Palace of Death, on to the Wheel of Fortune. At the door of Elysium Minos dictates who shall be permitted to enter; the generous and the honest are favoured, whatever their station, while the cruel and hypocritical are rejected. In the Elysian Fields heroes and writers of antiquity converse animatedly with Shakespeare, *Milton, *Dryden, *Addison, Fielding's own *Tom  Thumb, and many others. The spirit of Julian the Apostate appears and, for the major part of the book, discourses in several guises as slave, Jew, courtier, and statesman. The tale (the last part of which, about Anne Boleyn, may have been by Sarah *Fielding) comes to a somewhat haphazard end with the excuse that the rest of the 'manuscript' has been unfortunately burned. It was edited by C. Rawson, 1973; the best text is found in Miscellanies, by Henry Fielding, ed. Hugh Amory and Bertrand A. Goldgar (vol. ii, 1993).


Covent-Garden Journal, a periodical issued twice a week during 1752 by Henry Fielding containing some of the best work of his journalistic career. Under the name of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Censor of Great Britain, Fielding attacks political abuses, scandal, hypocrisy, meanness, sexual morality, fashion, and many other targets. It contained an attack on Smollett's *Peregrine Pickle and *Roderick Random, to which that author replied in a slanderous pamphlet, A Faithful Narrative of . . . *Habbakuk Hilding, Justice, Dealer, and Chapman.

A Digression on Vanity

THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES EP 1 P1

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

Crash Course Classics - Samuel Richardson

Samuel Richardson (Oxford Companion)

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), the son of a joiner, born near Derby, where his parents lived briefly before returning to London. Little is known of his boyhood, but because of his father's comparative poverty he appears to have received (in his own words) 'only common School-learning'. The tradition that he attended either Merchant Taylors' or *Christ's Hospital cannot be substantiated. As a boy he read widely, told stories to his friends, and by the age of 13 was employed writing letters for young lovers. In 1706 he was apprenticed to a printer (as his father could not afford to enter him to the Church), and in 1715 he was admitted a freeman of the *Stationers' Company. He set up in business on his own in 1721, in which year he married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his former master. All his working life he was extremely industrious, and his business prospered and expanded steadily. Like all printers of his time, he combined printing and publishing, producing books, journals, advertisement posters, and much miscellaneous work. In 1723 he took over the printing of an influential Tory journal, the True Briton, and by 1727 was sufficiently established in his profession to be appointed renter warden of the Stationers' Company. In the 1720s and early 1730s he suffered the early deaths of all his six children, and in 1731 that of his wife. He attributed the nervous disorders of his later life to the shock of these deaths. In 1733 he married Elizabeth Leake, the daughter of a fellow printer, and four of the daughters of their marriage survived. In the same year he published his The Apprentice's Vade Mecum, a book of advice on morals and conduct. In 1738 he purchased in Fulham a weekend 'country' house, which he always referred to as 'North End' , and which later became famous for his readings and literary parties. He published in 1739 his own version, pointedly moral, of Aesop's Fables, and more importantly, he began Pamela.

Inspiration for the novel initially came from a series of 'familiar letters' which fellow printers had encouraged him to write on the problems and concerns of everyday life. While these eventually grew into Pamela, they were also published separately as Letters . . . to and for Particular Friends (1741). Pamela was written in two months, between November 1739 and January 1740, and was published later that year, to very considerable acclaim. The morality and realism of the work were particularly praised, as Richardson had hoped. However, complaints of its impropriety persuaded him to revise his second edition considerably. The work had a great vogue abroad, and was soon adapted for the stage in France. Imitations and forged 'continuations' persuaded Richardson to go on with the story, and volumes iii and iv (Pamela II) were published in 1741. In that year, there appeared a stinging parody called An Apology for the Life of Mrs *Shamela Andrews, which Richardson believed to be by Fielding (as it almost certainly was) and which he never forgave. Fielding's *Joseph Andrews, which begins as a parody of Pamela, was published in 1742 but did not affect the popularity of Pamela II.

Richardson's business continued to prosper, although his health was beginning to cause him great concern, and he extended his publications in religion, history, biography, and literature. In 1733 he had begun printing for the House of Commons and in 1742 he secured the lucrative post of printer of its journals. His circle of friends had by now vastly increased, and included many admiring young ladies, known as his 'songbirds' or 'honorary daughters'.

During the writing of *Clarissa, which was probably begun in 1744, he endlessly asked his friends for comment and advice, and read passages aloud to them in his 'grotto' (or summer house) at Norht End. The first two volumes of Clarissa appeared in 1747 and were very favourably received. After heavy revision, and determined efforts to prune, a further five volumes appeared in 1748. Correspondents and the circle of friends continued to grow and now included the *Bluestocking ladies Mrs *Delany, Mrs *Carter, and later Mrs *Chapone. Clarissa was an undoubted success but there were complaints about both its length and its indecency, and it was not reprinted as often as Pamela. However, it also became very popular abroad and was translated into French, Dutch, and German.

Urged by friends, Richardson began thinking, in about 1750, of the portrayal of a 'Good Man'. He asked for the views of his extensive acquaintance and began experimenting with the 'letters' of Harriet, who was to become one of the heroines of his next novels. His illnesses and general malaise, which appear to have included a form of Parkinson's disease, increased steadily but he persevered strenuously both with his business and his writing. His authors in the 1750s included Charlotte *Lennox, Sarah *Fielding, Edward *Young and George *Lyttelton. He had now become friendly with Dr *Johnson, to whose *Rambler he contributed in 1750 and whom he helped with money in 1751. In 1752 Johnson (together with many of Richardson's other friends) read the draft of Sir Charles *Grandison, and Richardson printed the fourth volume of the Rambler. In 1753 he travelled to Bath and Cheltenham, which was as far as he had ever gone, and in 1753-4 he published the seven volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. The book sold well and rapidly became fashionable, but was assailed in various critical pamphlets for length, tedium, and doubtful morality.

In 1754-5 Richardson was master of the Stationers' Company. He published in 1755 A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments . . . in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, a book which he considered contained the pith of all his work.  In the same year Dr Johnson published the Dictionary, which contained 97 citations from Clarissa. In 1756  Richardson was asked by *Blackstone for adevice on the reform of the *Oxford University Press. Towards the end of his life Richarson wrote a few 'letters' to, from, and about Mrs Beaumont, a minor character from Sir Charles Grandison, who had been someone of mysterious importance in his early life. He continued to revise his novels heavily, and remained active in his business until his death.

Richarson is generally agreed to be one of the chief founders of the modern novel. All his novels were *epistolary, a form he took from earlier works in English and French, which he appreciated for its immediacy ('writing to the moment' as he called it), and which he reaised to a level not attained by any of his predecessors. The 'letters', of which his novels consist, contain many long transcriptions of conversations, and the kinship with drama seems very strong. He was acutely aware of the problems of prolixity ('Length, is my principle Disgust') and worked hard to prune his original drafts, but his interest in minute analysis led inevitably to an expansive style.

A selection of his letters (6 vols, 1804) was edited by Mrs *Barbauld: see also Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. J. Carroll (1964). There is a life by T. C. D. Eaves and B. D. Kimpel (1971); see also M. Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson, Dramatic Novelist (1973); M. A. Doody, A Natural Passion (1974). 






Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, a novel by Samuel *Richardson, published 1740-1.

The first of Richardson's three novels, Pamela consists, like them, entirely of letters and journals, of which Richardson presents himself as the 'editor'. He believed he had hit upon 'a new species of writing' but he was not the inventor of the *epistolary novel, several of which already existed in English and French. He did however raise the form to a level hitherto unknown, and transformed it to display his own particular skills.

There are six correspondents in Pamela, most with their own particular style and point of view, but Pamela herself provides most of the letters and journals, with the 'her', Mr B., having only two. Pamela Andrews is a hansome, intelligent girl of 15 when her kind employer Lady B. dies. Penniless and without protection, Pamela is pursued by Mr B., Lady B.'s son, but she repulses him and remains determined to retain her chastity and unsullied conscience. Letters reveal Mr B.'s cruel dominance and pride, but also Pamela's half-acknowledged tenderness for him, as well as her vanity, prudence, and calculation. Angrily Mr B. separates her from her friends, Mrs Jervis the housekeeper and Mr Longman the steward, and dispatches her to B— Hall, his remote house in Lincolnshire, where she is imprisoned, guarded, and threatened by the cruel Mrs. Jewkes.  Only the chaplain, Mr Williams, is her friend, but he is powerless to help. For 40 days, allowed no visits or correspondence, she keeps a detailed journal, analysing her situation and her feelings, and at the same time revealing her faults of prudence and pride. She despairs, and begins to think of suicide. Mr B., supposing her spirit must now be broken, arrives at B— Hall, and, thinking himself generous, offers to make her his mistress and keep her in style. She refuses indignantly, and he later attempts to rape her and then to arrange a mock-marriage. Two scenes by the pond mark a turning point in their relationship. Both begin to be aware of their faults, and of the genuine nature of their affection. However, Pamela again retreats and refuses his proposal of marriage. She is sent away from B— Hall, but a message gives her a last chance. Overcoming her pride and caution, she decides to trust him, accepts his offer, and they are married. In the remaining third of the book Pamela's goodness wins over even Lady Davers, Mr B.'s supercilious sister, and becomes a model of virtue to her circle of admiring friends; but (as in Pamela, Part II) the author's creative drive becomes overwhelmed by his urge to moralize.

The book was highly successful and fashionable, and further editions were soon called for. Richardson felt obliged to continue his story, not only because of the success of Pamela but because of the number of forged continuations that began to appear. Pamela, Part II appeared in 1741. Here Pamela is exhibited, through various small and separate instances, as the perfect wife, patiently leading her profligate husband to reform; a mother who adores (and breastfeeds) her children; and a friend who is at the disposal of all, and who brings about the penitence of the wicked. Much space is given over to discussion of moral, domestic, and general subjects. 

*Shamela (1741, almost certainly by *Fielding) vigorously mocked what the author regarded as the hypocritical morality of Pamela; and Fielding's *Joseph Andrews, which begins as a parody of Pamela, appeared in 1742.




Clarissa: or The History of a Young Lady, an *epistolary novel by Samuel *Richardson, published 1748 (for 1747)-1749, in eight volumes. About one-third of the work (which is in all over a million words) consists of the letters of Clarissa and Lovelace, mainly written to Anna Howe and John Belford respectively, but there are over 20 correspondents in all, displaying many points of view and variations in style. 


Lovelace, a handsome, dashing rake, is courting Arabella Harlowe, the elder sister of Clarissa. The Harlowes are an acquisitive, ambitious, 'narrow-souled' family, and when Lovelace transfers his affections to Clarissa they decide he is not good enough and that Clarissa must marry the wealthy but ugly Solmes, whom she detests. When she refuses she is locked up and humiliated. Lovelace, cleverly representing himself as her deliverer, plays on her fears, convinces her that he is forwarding her reconciliation with her family, and persuades her to escape under his protection to London. There he establishes her in a superior brothel, which she at first supposes to be respectable lodgings. She unwaveringly resists his advances and he, enraged by her intransigence, is also attracted by it and finds his love and respect for her increase. Her emotions are likewise deeply confused; she is fascinated by his charm and wit, but distrusts him and refuses his eventual proposals of marriage. In his growing insistence, Lovelace overreaches himself, interfering with her letters, deceiving her over a supposed emissary from her family, violently assalulting her, and cunningly ensnaring her after he escapes. As she unhappily but stubbornly resists, he becomes more obsessive in his determination to conquer, and makes an attempt to rape her. He claims to believe that her resistance is no more than prudery and that, once subdued, she will turn to him: 'Is not this  the hour of trial—And in her, of the trial of the virtue of her whole Sex, so long premeditated, so long threatened? —Whether her frost be frost indeed? Whether her virtue be principle?' (vol. V, Letter 31). To Clarissa chastity represents identity, and the climax of her tragedy comes when Lovelace, abetted by the women of the house, drugs and rapes her, an event he reports in one of the shortest letters of the work: 'And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.' (Vol. V, Letter 32). 


Slowly Clarissa loses grip of her reason, and Lovelace realizes that he has lost the very dominance he had hoped to establish. Cut off from family, friends, and even correspondence, Clarissa eventually escapes, only to find herself trapped in a debtor's prison. She is rescued by Belford, who looks after her with affectionate care. Lovelace is overwhelmed by remorse. Clarissa recovers her sanity, but almost ceases to write, and her long decline and Christian preparation for death are reported largely in letters by Belford. After her death her cousin, Colonel Morden, kills Lovelace in a duel. Because of its great length, the novel has been more admired than read, but it has always been held in high critical esteem; the characters of the protagonists are developed with great sutblety, and the irresolvable nature of their conflict takes on an emblematic and tragic quality unique for its author and its period.

Bibliografía sobre Samuel Richardson

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Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded: Summary and Analysis

Pope, Alexander

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble. Paragraph separations added:

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), the son of a Roman Catholic linen draper of London. His health was ruined and his growth stunted by a severe illness at the age of 12 (probably Pott's disease, a tubercular affection of the spine). He lived with his parents at Binfield in Windsor Forest and was largely self-educated. 

He showed his precocious metrical skill in his 'Pastorals' written, according to himself, when he was 16, and published in *Tonson's Miscellany (vol. vi) in 1709. (For Pope's quarrel with Ambrose Philips on this subject see under PHILIPS, A.). He became intimate with *Wycherley, who introduced him to London life. His *Essay on Criticism (1711) made him known to Addison's circle, and his *'Messiah' was published in the Spectator in 1712. *The Rape of the Lock appeared in Lintot's Miscellanies in the same year and was republished, enlarged, in 1714. His Ode for Music on St Cecilia's Day (1713), one of his rare attempts at lyric, shows that his gifts did not lie in this direction. 

In 1713 he also published *Windsor Forest, which appealed to the Tories by its references to the Peace of Utrecht, and won him the friendship of *Swift. He drifted away from Addison's 'little senate' and became a member of the *Scriblerus Club, an association that included Swift, *Gay, *Arbuthnot, and others. He issued in 1715 the first volume of his translation in heroic couplets of Homer's *Iliad. This work, completed in 1720, is more *Augustan than Homeric in spirit and diction, but has nevertheless been much admired. *Coleridge thought it an 'astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity'. It was supplemented in 1725-6 by a translation of the *Odyssey, in which he was assisted by William Broome and Elijah Fenton. The two translations brought him financial independence. He moved in 1718 with his mother to Twickenham, where he spent the rest of his life, devoting much time to his garden and grotto; he was keenly interested in *landscape gardening and committed to the principle 'Consult the Genius of the Place in all'.

In 1717 had appeared a collection of his works containing two poems dealing, alone among his works, with the passion of love. They are 'Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady', an elegy on a fictitious lady who had killed herself through hopeless love, and *'Eloisa to Abelard', in which Eloisa describes her inner conflicts after the loss of her lover. About this time he became strongly attached to Martha *Blount, with whom his friendship continued throughout his life, and to Lady Mary Wortley *Montagu, whom in later years he assailed with bitterness. Lady Mary left for Turkey in July 1716 and Pope sent her 'Eloisa to Abelard' with a letter suggesting that he was passionately grieved by her absence.

Pope assisted Gray in writing the comedy Three Hours after Marriage (1717) but made no other attempt at drama. In 1723, four years after Addison's death, appeared (in a miscellany called Cytherea) Pope's portrait of *Atticus, a satire on Addison written in 1715. An extended version appeared as 'A Fragment of a Satire' in a 1727 volume of Miscellanies (by Pope, Swift, Arbuthot, and Gay)., and took its final form in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735). 

In the same Miscellanies volume Pope published his prose treatise *Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry, ridiculing among others Ambrose Philips, *Theobald, and John *Dennis. In 1725 Pope published an edition of Shakespeare, the errors in which were pointed out in a pamphlet by Theobald, Shakespeare Restored (1726). This led to Pope's selection of Theobald as hero of his *Dunciad, a satire on Dullness in three books, on which he had been at work for some time: the first volume appeared anonymously in 1728. Swift, who spent some months with Pope in Twickenham in 1726, provided much encouragement for this work, of which a further enlarged edition was published in 1729. An additional book, The New Dunciad, was published in 1742, prompted this time, it appears, by *Warburton. The complete Dunciad in four books, in which Colley Cibber replaces Theobald as hero, appeared in 1743.

Influenced in part by the philosophy of his friend *Bolingbroke, Pope published a series of moral and philosophical poems, *Essay on Man (1733-34), consisting of four Epistles; and *Moral Essays (1731-5), four in number: Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, Of the Characters of Women, and two on the subject Of the Use of Riches. A fifth epistle was added, addressed to Addison, occasioned by his dialogue on medals. This was originally written in Addison's lifetime, c. 1716. In 1733 Pope published the first of his miscellaneous satires, Imitations of Horace, entitled 'Satire I', a paraphrase of the first satire of the second book of Horace, in the form of a dialogue between the poet and William Fortescue, the lawyer. In it Pope defends himself against the charge of Malignity, and professes to be inspired only by love of virtue. He inserts, however, a gross attack on his former friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as 'Sappho'. He followed this up with his Imitations of Horace's Satires 2.2 and 1.2 ('Sober Advice from Horace'), in 1734, and of Epistles 1.6; 2.2; 2.1; and 1.1, in 1737.  Horace's Epistle 1.7 and the latter part of Satire 2.6 'imitated in the manner of Dr Swift', appeared in 1738. The year 1735 saw the appearance of the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, the prologue to the above Satires, one of Pope's most brilliant pieces of irony and invective, mingled with autobiography. It contains the famous portraits of Addison (ll. 193-214) and Lord *Hervey, and lashes his minor critics, Dennis, Cibber, *Curll, Theobald, etc. In 1738 appeared One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, two satirical dialogues. These satires, and the 'Satires (2 and 4) of Dr Donne Versified' (1735), with the New Dunciad, closed his literary career.

He was partly occupied during his later years with the publication of his earlier correspondence, which he edited and amended in such a manner as to misrepresent the literary history of the time. He also employed discreditable artifices to make it appear that it was published against his wish. Thus he procured the publication by Curll of his 'Literary Correspondence' in 1735, and then endeavored to disavow him.

With the growth of *Romanticism Pope's poetry was increasingly seen as artificial; Coleridge commented that Pope's thoughts were 'translated into the language of poetry'. *Hazlitt called him 'the poet not of nature but of art', and W. L. Bowles compared his work to 'a game of cards'; *Byron, however, was highly laudatory: 'Pope's pure strain / Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain.' Matthew *Arnold's famous comment, 'Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose' (Essays in Criticism, 1880), summed up much 19th-cent. opinion, and it was not until *Leavis and *Empson that a serious attempt was made to rediscover Pope's richness, variety, and complexity.

Minor works that deserve mention are:

Verse: the Epistles 'To a Young Lady (Miss Blount) with the Works of Voiture' (1712), to the same 'On her Leaving the town after the Coronation' (1717); 'To Mr Jervas with Dryden's Translation of Fresony's Art of Painting' (1716) and 'To Robert, Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer' (1721); 'Vertumnus and Pomona' , 'Sappho to Phaon', and 'The Fable of Dryope', translations from *Ovid (1712); *'January and May', 'The Wife of Bath, her Prologue', and The Temple of Fame, from *Chaucer (1709, 1714, 1715).

Prose: The Narrative of Dr Robert Norris (1713), a satirical attack on Dennis; A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, on . . . Mr Edmund Curll (1716), an attack on Curll (to whom he had secretly administered an emetic).

The standard edn. of Pope's poetry is the Twickenham Edition, under the general editorship of J. Butt 811 vols. plus Index, 1940-69); see also G. Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1949); P.
*Quennell, Alexander Pope: The Education of a Genius (1968), M. Mack, The Garden and the City (1969) and Alexander Pope: A Life (1985); Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (1978).

The Rape of the Lock, a poem by *Pope, in two cantos, published in Linto's Miscellany 172 as "The Rape of the Locke"; subsequently enlarged to five cantos and thus published 1714.

When Lord Petre forcibly cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, the incident gave rise to a quarrel between the families. With the idea of allaying this, Pope treated the subject in a playful *mock-heroic poem, on the model of *Boileau's Le Lutrin. He presents Belinda at her toilet, a game of ombre, the snipping of the lock while Belinda sips her coffee, the wrath of Belinda and her demand that the lock be restored, the final wafting of the lock, as a new star, to adorn the skies. The poem was published in its original form with Miss Fermor's permission. Pope then expanded the sketch by introducing the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, adapted from a light erotic French work, Le Comte de Gabalis, a series of five discourses by the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars, which appeared in English in 1680; in his dedication he credits both Gabalis and the *Rosicrucians. (See also PARACELSUS). One of Pope's most brilliant performances, it has also been one of his most popular: Dr.*Johnson called it 'the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions', in which 'New things are made familiar and familiar things are made new'.



Essay on Man, a philosophical poem in heroic couplets by *Pope, published 1733-34, part of a larger poem projected but not completed.

It consists of four epistles addressed to *Bolingbroke, and perhaps to some extent inspired by his fragmentary philosophical writings. Its objective is to vindicate the ways of God to man; to prove that the scheme of the universe is the best of all possible schemes, in spite of appearances of evil, and that our failure to see the perfection of the whole is due to our limited vision. 'Partial Ill' is 'universal Good', and 'self-love and social' are directed to the same end; 'All are but parts of one stupenduous whole / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.' The epistles deal with man's relations to the universe, to himself as an individual, to society, and to happiness. D. *Stewart thought the Essay 'the noblest specimen of philosophical poetry our language affords' (Active and Moral Powers, 1828), but Dr *Johnson commented, 'Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised.' Pope's attempts to prove that 'Whatever is, is right' anticipate the efforts of Pangloss in *Voltaire's Candide.



 

Análisis del discurso: Gramáticas, contextos, conversaciones, estilos

Pope and his elder contemporaries (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 
From A Short History of English Literature (1907), by George Saintsbury (The Augustan Ages, ch. 5).

Divisions of eighteenth-century verse — Pope: his life — His work — His character — His poetry — His couplet and paragraph — His phrase — His subjects — Garth — Blackmore —Congreve, etc. — Prior —His metrical imporatance — Young — Parnell — Lady Winchilsea

Divisions of eighteenth-century verse

THE poetry of the eighteenth century can be classified with a completeness and a convenience uncommon in literary periods. In the first division we see the complete triumph of the "classical" and "correct," or conventional, ideal at once exemplified and achieved in the work of Pope. This is followed by a rather longer period, in which the dominant poetry—the kind of verse admired and praised by almost all the vulgar and a few of the elect—is imitation of Pope, tempered more or less by that of Dryden. But side by side with both these (and even at the very earliest represented by Lady Winchilsea and one or two others) there is a party of mostly unintentional revolt which first, as represented by Thomson, reverts to nature in observation, but generalises still in expression; then, as presented by Gray, while not neglecting nature, changes all the sources of its literary inspiration, seeking them always farther back and wider. In respect of form the two first schools are almost wholly busied, except in light and occasional verse, with the couplet; while the third, in its endeavour not to be conventional, takes refuge in blank verse and stanza-form. In the present chapter we shall have to do with the first, and one or two belated or precocious members of the third. The second and the main body of the third will occupy us in the next Book.

Pope: his life.

NOTE 1. The standard library edition of Pope is that of Elwin and Courthope, with an exhaustive Life by the latter, 11 vols., London, 1870-89. The "Globe" edition of the Poems, by A W. Ward, is exceptionally valuable.

Alexander Pope (NOTE 1) —within certain narrow but impregnable limits one of the greatest masters of poetic form that the world has ever seen, and a considerable, though sometimes over-rated, satirist—was born in London in 1688, of a respectable tradesman's family. His parents were Roman Catholics, and Pope was rather badly educated in his early youth. From the time when his father moved to Binfield, on the outskirts of Windsor Forest, he seems to have educated himself. The bad health and physical deformity which marred his later life, and to which the disagreeable parts of his character have been traced, with a mixture of reason and charity, are said not to have been congenital. He wrote verse very early; but his extreme untruthfulness makes it very uncertain how much before the date of publication any particular piece was composed. Still, the dates of the Pastorals (1709), when he was twenty-one, of the Essay on Criticism, two years later, and of Windsor Forest, two years later still, establish beyond all question his early command of versification and expression. Even before the earliest of these dates Pope had been introduced to Wycherley and to Walsh, and through them he became acquainted with the rising prose lights of literature—Addison, Steele, and, above all, Swift. These (at least Swift) zealously furthered his scheme of translating the Iliad, which was started 1713, began to appear next year, and was finished in 1720. This, like the Odyssey, which followed, and a good deal of which was done by assistants (Fenton and Broome), was published by subscription, and the two brought Pope in not much less than £10,000, a sum which, at the rates of interest then prevailing, and with some paternal property, was enough to put him in affluence for the rest of his life. That life presents little history except a record of disease, publications, and quarrels. It was in 1718 that he established himself at Twickenham, which as headquarters he never afterwards left, and here he died in 1744.

His work.

The order of his later publications was as follows. The Rape of the Lock, published partially in 1712, reappeared during the time of his work on Homer in 1714. He produced an edition of Shakespeare, which could not well be good, in 1728. His satirical powers, which had already been exhibited in fragments, at last took the form of The Dunciad (1728-29) a violent attack on the minor writers of the day, with whom Pope fancied that he had the quarrel of Wit against Dulness, while he really had that of an exceedingly irritable poet against reviewers and, in some sense, rivals. Thereafter he fell into a course of half-moral, half-satirical writings—Epistle to Lord Burlington, Essay on Man, Imitations of Horace, Epistle to Arbuthnot, etc. (1730-1738), which, whether poetry or not, whether philosophy or not, are at any rate the most brilliant examples in English of one particular kind of verse and one particular kind of style. His last important work was an alteration and enlargement of The Dunciad (1742-43). Neither changes nor additions were by any means always improvements, but the finale of the complete poem is one of the very greatest things that Pope ever wrote, and one of his strongest titles to the name of poet.


His character.

That his claims to that name could be disputed probably never entered the head of any of his contemporaries save his personal foes, nor perhaps into the heart and conscience of any even of these. They were sufficiently numerous, and Pope amply deserved them. His faults, from their evident connection with a sort of childish weakness, invite, and have received, compassion; but to deny them is absurd. Nor were his virtues extremely conspicuous. He is credited with sincere affection for his friends. But there were no two men whom he loved and honoured more than Swift and Bolingbroke, and yet he could not resist playing upon both some underhand literary tricks to which he was more addicted than any great man of letters except his contemporary and analogue Voltaire. He lampooned Addison, who had perhaps given him a provocation of which a magnanimous person would have made nothing, while it very possibly had no existence except in his own morbid fancy; and though the lampoon, the "Character of Atticus," is magnificent literature and not quite unjust, it is all the baser ethically for its genius and its justice. He made violent and foolish love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and being, or thinking himself, snubbed, revenged the snub with vulgar insults which the pen of no gentleman could ever have allowed to flow from it at any time, except that of the literary bravos of his old friend Wycherley's youth. Even his partisans have allowed a feeling of revolt at the venomous and snobbish delight with which he dwells at once on the poverty and the dinnerlessness of his Grub Street foes. He was stingy in entertaining (a very rare fault for his time); he had, with no motive to save, old tricks of writing on backs of letters and scraps of paper; he had many minor faults. Yet those of his friends with whom he did not quarrel never quarrelled with him, and it would be unfair to ask whether it was policy or generosity which made him invariably favourable to rising young men of letters—Thomson and Johnson are the great and sufficient, though by no means the only, examples who made their appearance in his time—provided only they did not join the real or imagined army of Diabolus in Grub Street. He was a very good son; his passion for Martha Blount—a passion which was not too well requited, though the object benefited by it most handsomely—seems to have been faithful and intense—and though troublesome to his inferiors and servants from his infirmities, he seems to have been liked by them.


His poetry.

But his character, save for its close connection with his work, matters very little; his literature matters very much. The greater jars of the conflict over the question "Was Pope a poet?" have mostly ceased. Hardly anybody now would dream of denying that he was a poet; very few would assert that he was one of the greatest kind. Some indeed have challenged for him the phrase "Return to nature" which has generally been applied to the revolters from him. The argument, which lacks neither ingenuity or plausibility, is that from the Elizabethan time to the Pindaric imitators of Cowley a non-natural exaggeration had been a curse, if not the curse, of English poetry, and that Pope finally abolished this. Unluckily, however, Cleveland had been dead for fifty years when Pope wrote; Dryden had "appealed to sense" long before he was born; and the prevalent faults of the time immediately preceding were not those of unnatural conceit. Even had it been otherwise, the nature to which he returned was, in all but one respect, a nature of prose, not of poetry. He did refine, to the utmost possible extent, one special kind of verse, and this—perhaps this only—establishes his claim to be a poet. Those who hold that though (to their sorrow) there may be verse without poetry, there cannot be poetry without verse, are not the least trusty guardians of Pope's position. He may be open to attack on other sides; here the defence may laugh at any assault.


His couplet and paragraph.

Pope's extraordinary mastery of a certain refinement on the Drydenian couplet, which, losing not a little strength and colour, and something of that portion of the poetic vague which Dryden retained, added an incomparable lightness and polish, seems to have been attained very early. In the Essay on Criticism it is nearly so advanced, if not quite as sure, as in the satires of thirty years later. The secret, so far as there is a single one, is the bold discarding of everything but the consideration of the couplet itself—triplets and Alexandrines, the enjambement which even Dryden sometimes permitted himself, and the structure of the paragraph by any other than sense-methods. This last is, of course, the important exception, and it speaks volumes for Pope's skill that he can, by means of the sense merely, connect together strings of couplets of which, by no means infrequently, each is complete in itself in rhythm as in meaning. But he sacrifices every attraction of form to the couplet—light, bright, glittering, varied in a manner almost impossible to account for, tipped ever with the neatest, smartest, sharpest rhyme, and volleying on the dazzled, though at times at times at any rate satiated, reader a sort of salvo of feux-d'artifice, skipping, crackling, scattering colour and sound all round and about him. If we take a paragraph of Milton's with one of Pope's, and compare the apparent variety of the constitutent stones of the one building with the apparent monotony of those of the other, the difference may be at first sight quite bewildering. One of Dryden's, between the two, will partly, though not entirely, solve the difficuty by showing how the law of the prose paragraph, that of meaning, is brought to supply the place of that of the pure poetic paragraph, the composition of sound and music.


His phrase.

Pope's other engine for attaining his effect was phraseology, in which he displays the same exquisite, though limited, perfection. Here, again, of the remoter and rarer graces of style there are none. Pope suggests little; no conjunction of his words causes the "wild surprise" given by the phrase of Chaucer, and by those of an unbroken succession from Spenser to Dryden. So also (in this point inferior to his friends Addison and Swift) he has little humour. But his wit is of the finest, and everything that he wishes to say, everything that comes within his purview as proper to be said, is expressed with unequalled propriety. It is impossible to improve on Pope; to get something better you must change the kind. Nor can there be much doubt that, in the negative as in the positive sides of this perfection, he is indebted to that process of conscious or unconscious conventionalising which all his time adored and which he brought to its acme. The individual and particular graces of the literature before and after his century give a nobler gust, but it is hit or miss with them. Pope's process—of extracting and representing the best thought within his compass in the best words that his own genius (still careful of the common) could achieve—is lower but surer. He cannot (or can but very rarely when transported by private passion, as in the the "Character of Atticus," or by the contagion of a greater genius, as in the conclusion of The Dunciad, which is Swift done into poetry) give the greatest things. But what he can give he gives quite unerringly; he is a secure and impeccable master of his own craft.


His subjects.

With so peculiar a genius as this (for it would be absurd to stint Pope to the word "talent," though some logical defense might be made for it) his subject could not but be of the greatest importance, while even his treatment of matters was necessarily conditioned by his knowledge. In the subjects of the Pastorals, of the Messiah, of Windsor Forest (NOTE 1) he was not really at home, and all these are in consequence mere pastiches—things immensely clever but no more. In the Essay on Criticism the subject itself was thoroughly congenial. Pope knew his own ideal of literature, could express that ideal critically as few could, and express it constructively as could no other man in the world. But he was a very bad judge of other styles and other ideals, and his knowledge of literary as of other history would have disgraced the meanest hack in his own fancied Grub Street. Consequently, here and wherever else he touches the subject, we get the most ridiculous statements of fact and the most absurd arguments based upon them, side by side with maxims and judgments worthy of almost any signature in sense, and expressed as no one but Pope could express them in form.

NOTE 1. Wordsworth, usually unjust to Pope, has been too generous to this poem. It gives literally nothing of the forest of the Thames Valley: a library and a poulterer's shop would furnish all its material.

And this difference holds throughout. The Iliad, for instance, a wonderful tour de force of literature, has long become merely a curiosity, because if we want Homer we either go to himself or to a translator who has some sense of him. The Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady and the Eloisa to Abelard, again, are both marred, though not ruined, by the prevalence of conventionalism in reference to subjects which, above all others, refuse and defy convention. But the Rape of the Lock, artificial as it is, is a perfect triumph of artifice, a piece with which no fault can be found except the frequency of the gradus-epithet, and in which the gradus-epithet is is excused by its suitableness to the persons and the manners handled.

Yet it is in his later Essay, his Epistles, his Satires, his Dunciad, that Pope's genius shows at its very greatest. They are no doubt mosaics—the "Atticus" passage was pretty certainly written twenty years before its insertion in the Epistle to Arbuthnot—but this is no defect in them. Their value for meaning varies accordingly as Pope was copying optimism from Bolingbroke, pessimism from Swift, and a very remarkable kind of orthodoxy from Warburton, or was giving expression to his own keen, though, alas! limited, observation of society, his personal feelings, and his narrow but clear theory of life and literature. Here he reigns triumphant. His philosophy may be always shallow and sometimes mere nonsense; his satire may lack the large Olympian sweep of Dryden; but he looked on society, and on humanity as that society happened for the time to express it, with an unclouded eye, and he expressed his views with a pen that never stumbled, never made slips of form, and always said the right thing in the right way, when we once accept scheme and time and man.

Pope, a young man at his beginnings but very precocious, began to be copied, or to be revolted from, with almost unexampled earliness; but the imitators and rebels may best be left for future treatment. We shall deal here with those of his contemporaries whom dates or other things excuse from the charge of being either, though some even of these may have felt his mighty influence. We have noted the poetical works of Swift and Addison under their names earlier; we may here take Garth, Blackmore, Prior, Congreve, Gay, Parnell, Young, a few minors, and—a friendly but, though she knew it not, deadly foe—Lady Winchilsea.


Garth.

Samuel Garth (NOTE 1), a strong Whig, but popular with both parties, and of very great repute as a physician, was born at Bolam in Durham as early as 1660, went to Cambridge (Peterhouse), where he remained till he took his M.D. in 1691, and spent the rest of his life practising in London. He was the friend, physician, and interrer of Dryden, was familiar with all the Queen Anne men, was knighted at George I.'s accesion, and died in 1718. Garth owes his place in English literature, which ought to be no mean one, to the fact that his poem The Dispensary was published in 1699, before Dryden's death, and that its versification makes advances on Dryden's own in Pope's direction. Its subject, a doctors' quarrel, does not give us much amusement now, though it has some interest in starting a long line of more or less similar poems on less or more unpromising subjects during the century. Garth followed it up many years later, after he had strengthened The Dispensary itself with some of its best parts, by a poem on Claremont, and translated some Ovid. But the help which he gave to the perfecting of the couplet in this form is his title to memory.

NOTE 1. Garth and Congreve, with all the writers that follow except Lady Winchilsea, are in Chalmers.

Blackmore.

The more notorious verse-writer, after Garth, of the interregnum between Pope and Dryden was the luckless Sir Richard Blackmore, one of the small and curious company who have been made immortal by their satirists. Born about 1650, at Corsham, in Wilts, he spent a long time at Oxford, and afterwards took his M. D. at Padua. He had a good practice, and the "Quack Maurus" of Dryden, whom he censured and who hit back, does not appear to have had any special justification. He seems to have begun to write verse to pass the time as he drove from patient to patient, and he published the long poems of Prince Arthur (1695), King Arthur (1697), Job (1700), Eliza (1705), and Creation (1712), besides essays, psalms, etc. He died in 1729, having been still more unmercifully ridiculed by the wits of the second generation. Creation (NOTE 2), however, was highly praised, not merely by Addison, to whom piety and Whiggery combined would have been an irresistible bribe, but by Johnson, to whom the second quality would have neutralised the first.  It is difficult for a reader of the present day to share their admiration. Creation supplies (as, for the matter of that, do the other poems, so far as the present writer knows them) tolerable rhetoric in verse occasionally not bad. But this is a different thing from poetry. Blackmore's couplets are often enjambed; and it seems (indeed he boasted of it) that he knew little of the popular poetry of his day.

NOTE 2. In Chalmers, vol. X.; the rest must be sought in the original.

Congreve, etc.

Congreve (NOTE 1) deserves such a niche as he has in purely poetical history as the producer of a few songs very much in the character of those mentioned earlier as the last product of the Cavalier muse, but with more of the order and neatness of the eighteenth century. He is sometimes impudent, but rarely, like the Dorsets and the Sedleys, merely coarse, and the note of the careless fine gentleman which he so much affected in his life does appear in his poems, especially by comparison with Prior, whom, though he falls far short of him in nature, tenderness, whimsical wit, and suspicion of higher and deeper feeling, he excels in that indescribable and sometimes denied, but quite real, quality called breeding. Ambrose Philips and Thomas Tickell were both friends of Addison and (whether of their own choice or as a result of Pope's irritable vanity is uncertain) enemies of Pope. The former—to be carefully distinguished from John Philips (1676-1708), author of the admirable Miltonic burlesque of the Splendid Shilling and of a good poem, or at least verse-essay, on Cider— was born in Leicestershire in 1671, and died in London in 1749. His short sentimental verses to children gained him from Carey (the author of "Sally in our alley") the nickname of "Namby-Pamby," which has passed into the language as a common epithet. Tickell, a Cumberland man and a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford (1676-1740), is chiefly remembered for two splendid couplet-elegies on Addison (whose devoted friend he was) and on Marlborough's lieutenant Cadogan. The majesty which this particular form could put on has seldom been better shown, except in the final lines of The Dunciad. But we must turn to men of more poetical substance.

Prior.

Matthew Prior (NOTE 1), the king of "verse of society" in English, was born near Wimborne in 1664, and was educated at Westminster, going thence to Cambridge, but to St. John's, not, as usual with his schoolfellows, to Trinity. He took his degree in 1686, and obtained a Fellowship, which he kept through life, and which kept him at some times of it. He wrote a bad parody of The Hind and the Panther in conjunction with Montague, afterwards Halifax, but did nothing else till he was of middle of age, though he enjoyed to the full the copious if transient stream of patronage of men of letters, which his coadjutor did much to set running. He was even Ambassador to France; was deeply engaged in the still obscure intrigues which just failed to seat James III. on the throne of England at his sister's death; is suspected of having turned king's evidence, but was imprisoned for some years. He had published poems in 1709, and issued another collection in splendid form after his liberation in 1718. He did not long survive this, and died in 1721. He was, though an intimate, somewhat of a detached intimate of the literary society of his time, and is said frankly to have preferred less distinguished associates.

NOTE 1.  In Chalmers, and common in editions from his own gorgeous folio downwards. Mr. Austin Dobson's Selected Poems of Prior ("Parchment Library," London, 1889) contains most things of much value but not all, the change of manners sometimes making Prior difficult to reproduce nowadays.

The works of Prior are rather numerous than voluminous, and they are very curiously assorted. The only pieces of any bulk are Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, and Solomon, or The Vanity of the World. The first, divided into three cantos, is an extremely fantastic, though, according to most (not all) critics, somewhat tedious poem in Hudibrastic verse, and quite openly imitating Butler in style as well as in metre. Although, however, the guise is burlesque, the subject-matter is by no means wholly so; and Prior, the lightness of whose best-known work has perhaps rather obscured the fact that he was a scholar and a man of no small reading, has put a good deal of thought as well as of learning in an ill-chosen fashion. Solomon, which is also in three divisions (here called "books"), is in heroic couplets of a rather Drydenian than Popian cast, with frequent Alexandrines. Here too the poem is much better worth reading than is usually thought; but the author's inability to be frankly serious again shows itself. His treatment of Vanity has neither the bitter quintessence of Swift, nor the solemn and sometimes really tragic declamation of Young, nor that intense conviction and ethical majesty which make Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes almost a great poem, and beyond all question a great piece of literature. His next most important works in point of bulk are a handful of tales after the manner of La Fontaine, for which the rigid Johnson himself made a famous excuse, but which, though they contain some of their author's earliest and pleasantest writing, make their appearance not at all, or with considerable difficulty and adjustment, in modern volumes intended for general reading. Longer than these, indeed, are the Carmen Seculare, a dull Pindaric to William the Deliverer, and Henry and Emma, an ill-judged modernising of the exquisite Nut-brown Maid, but they form no part of Prior's title to fame.

This, which is completely indefeasible, rests upon a cloud of bright trifles, or things pretty serious within but bright and trifling in appearance, heterogenous enough in subject and form, but all animated by the same dainty, whimsical touch in metre, phrase, and poetic style. He can be merely sentimental and achieve mere sentiment charmingly; impudently but triumphantly caricaturing, as in his parody of Boileau's fustian on the taking of Namur; arch, in the best sense of that almost obsolete and long misused but really useful word, as in a hundred pieces of which "Cloe and Euphelia" stands perhaps first in order in his collected works; deliberately but exquisitely trivial, as in "The Secretary." Prior has never been approached in the ligher love-poem of a certain kind, such as "The Lover's Anger," or "Dear Cloe, how blubbered is that pretty face!" For all his easy morality, no juster, shrewder, and more good-natured life-philosophy was ever put than in "An English Padlock." What may be more surprising to those who do not see from the first that Prior was no mere wit but a true humourist is that his gaiety can, with an imperceptible turn, admit a real and a most melancholy wisdom, as in the beautiful and justly famous "Lines written in the beginning of Mersaray's History of France." In the mere epigram, such as those on Dr. Radcliffe, on Bibo, and others, where only wit is wanted, he is supreme; his verses to children, especially the famous "Child of Quality," defy competition; the "Epitaph on Jack and Joan" shows, like some things of his, how keen a knowledge of humanity underlay his apparently frivolous ways; and in "Down Hall," the narrative of a trip into Essex, he set an example of lighter narrative verse in easy anapaestics which has been regularly followed, and perhaps never improved upon, since.

His metrical importance.

This last brings us to one of Prior's greatest historical merits. The tyranny of the couplet was severe enough in the eighteenth century as it was. But it would have been worse still if this poet, influential in position and friendships, attractive in subject, and of an exquisite skill in his art, had not evaded that tyranny by writing verse for lighter purposes in anapaestic measures, in the octosyllable, and in various lyric forms. The anapaestic tetrameter, in particular, may be said to have almost owed its matriculation in the list of permitted metres to Prior. Dryden had used it, but chiefly in compositions intended definitely for music, in which it was no novelty, having been used for ballads and songs time out of mind. But it had been regardee as a sort of "blind fiddler's measure"—good enough for "Drolleries" and "Garlands" and so forth, but scarcely worthy of "The Muses." Prior accomplished its presentation to these punctilious divinities once for all. Henceforward the correctest poet felt that there was no crime in now and then deserting couplet for these freer measures; and as a matter of fact we find in them by far the larger part of the real poetry of the eighteenth century.

Gay.

Something of the same beneficient influence was exercised by John Gay (NOTE 1), who, though a far less exquisite and poet than Prior, had perhaps more special sympathy for the country, as opposed to the town, than "Dear Mat."

NOTE 1. Very popular in the eighteenth century; a little neglected in this. Amends, however, have recently been made in two very pretty editions, of the Fables by Mr. Austin Dobson (London, 1882), and of the whole Poems by Mr. Underhill (2 vols. London, 1893).

He was born in the same year (1688) with Pope, at Barnstaple, in the county which contains the most exquisite mixture of scenery in England, but he seems to have thought himself more at home

Where Catherine Street descends into the Strand

than on the banks of the Taw or in the hill-solitudes of its springs. His family was no ill one, but poor, and he was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London. From this unpromising occupation he passed to that of secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, Anne Scott, the "charming Annabel" of Dryden. In 1713 he published a poem on "Rural Sports," containing some description more vivid and direct than the age generally showed, and dedicated it to Pope. Introduction to the wits and the patrons followed, and Gay had a small share, and apparently might have had, but for laziness and indiscretion, a larger one, in the golden shower still falling on men of letters. The same qualities prevented him from making his fortune in the South Sea Bubble—for Craggs gave him stock, he would not sell during the craze, and lost everything—and perhaps contributed to defeat his expectations from George II. But he was one of those fortunate, helpless persons whom everybody helps, and the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry took him into their household, managed his money for him (he made a good deal by the Beggar's Opera), and prevented him from having any need of it. He died at the end of 1732, too lazy even to make a will. The traditional character of him as of a kind of human lapdog, without any vice except extreme self-indulgence, has been little disturbed.

His earliest poem, Wine, published some years before that above noticed, in 1708, belongs to the same class as John Philips's pieces, clever enough Miltonic parody. In Rural Sports he shifted to the inevitable couplet, which again he wrote well; in fact, Gay did nothing ill, he only wanted initiation and discretion. The Shepherd's Week (1714) relapsed on parody, the subject being now Virgil and Spenser, or rather the namby-pamby imitators of both. The mock-heroic couplets of this are often happy, if not very strong. But Gay's skill in this kind reached its acme in Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1715), which is one of the most vivid things of the sort ever done, and for all its rather teasing falsetto, remains a document for the subject and a pleasant poem in itself. His Epistles exhibit the same pleasing, if somewhat uninspired, accomplishment, and his Ecologues might sometimes be Pope and sometimes Young. It is more to his real credit that he had a lyrical gift possessed by neither of these, his greater contemporaries. The immortal, if conventional, "Black-Eyed Susan," the more genuine "'Twas when the seas were roaring," the most musical "Phyllida" song, and a great many others, have sometimes more sweetness than Prior, though seldom as much air and fire. His dramatic pieces, Acis and Galatea, and still more the Beggar's Opera, are yet unforgotten. He wrote Tales, again very like Prior's; and lastly, there are his once universally, and still widely, known Fables. They have been for some time neglected, which is a pity, for they are perennial sense expressed in good, though not quite perennial, verse. Gay could do almost anything that his friends told him to do or that he had a model for; but he required these assistances.

Young.

With Edward Young [NOTE 1: In Chalmers, but not recently edited as a whole] we come to a poet of greater originality and force, but of much less equal achievement, than Gay, a poet who in more ways than one represents a development independent of Pope, and to some extent reactionary from the movement which Pope represented. Young was not merely Pope's senior; he actually, in the Universal Passion (1725-28), preceded that writer in his special form of satire, and did nearly, if not quite, as well in it as Pope himself at his very best. But the major part of his work is of a kind very different from Pope's. He was born in Hampshire in the year 1681, went to Oxford, and obtaining one of the then very rare Fellowships (at All Souls) which were not necessarily clerical, did not take orders till late in life. He is said to have at last done so from ambition, and disappointment in his hopes of preferment is credited with at least part of the gloom of the Night-Thoughts. He did not die till 1655, having published verse, Resignation, as late as three years earlier. He was a playwright, and his play of The Revenge was long very popular. His non-dramatic verse is copious, and its merit varies in the strangest degree.

Young's first poem was The Last Day, published in 1713. It, like The Force of Religion, which followed it a year later, is in couplets, and both poems display Young's peculiar and, to modern tastes, not very pleasant mixture of probably sincere, but gloomy and bombastically expressed, religious awe, together with an exaggeration of that flattery of "the great" on earth which seventeenth and eighteenth century century feeling permitted, if it did not actually demand. There are, however, very fine things in The Last Day, and it is the best piece on any great scale that he did, except the Night-Thoughts. The Force of Religion, on the story of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, is mawkish and sometimes ridiculous. There could be few greater contrasts than the seven satires of Love of Fame, or The Universal Passion, which followed at about ten years' interval. As observed above, Pope is anticipated, and all but equalled, in these vigorous compositions, where the artificiality of the treatment is excused by theat of the subjects, and where Young shows himself a past master, not merely of the crack but of the sting, of the couplet lash. Then we come upon Ocean, an Ode (1728), which, like all Young's other odes (Imperium Pelagi, 1729, etc.), affords examples, hard to be excelled in the works of the meanest writers, of the unintentional mock heroic, and then to The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts.

It is difficult to give even a guess whether this remarkable poem will ever recover much or anything of the great reputation which it long held, and which, for two generations at least, it has almost entirely lost. It has against it, the application of phrase and even of thoguht, merely of an age, to the greatest and most lasting subjects, and a tone only to be described as the theatrical-religious. Its almost unbroken gloom frets or tires according to the mood and temperament of the reader. On the other hand, the want of sincerity is always more apparent than real, and the moral strength and knowledge of human nature, which were the great merits of the eighteenth century, appear most unmistakably. Above all, the poem deserves the praise due to very fine and, in part at least, very original versification. If Young here deserts the couplet, it is, as we have seen, by no means because he cannot manage it; it is because he is at least partly dissatisfied with it, and sees that it will not serve his turn. And his blank verse is a fine and an individual kind. Its fault, due, no doubt, to his practice in drama, is that it is a little too declamatory, a little too suggestive of soliloquies in an inky cloak with footlights in front. But this of itself distinguishes it from the blank verse of Thomson, which came somewhat earlier. It is not a direct imitation either of Milton or of Shakespeare, and deserves to be ranked by itself. The Night-Thoughts, which were late (1742-44) were at once Young's best work and his last good work. Resignation is much weaker, but not quite dotage.

Parnell.

Thomas Parnell [NOTE 1: Ed. Aitken, London, 1894.] may also be classed as an unconscious rebel. He was of a good Cheshire family, but was born in Dublin in 1679; entered Trinity College, took his degree and orders, and in 1705 was made Archdeacon of Clogher. Swift introduced him to Harley and converted him to Toryism, but the change of dynasty made his converstion infructuous, though Swift procured further preferment for him from Archbishop King. He is said to have felt the death of his wife very severely, and himself died young in 1717.


It is curious that, out of the small bulk of Parnell's poetical work, poetical criticism of the most various times and tastes has been able to pick quite different things to sustain his reputation. The famous "Hermit" has kept its place in all anthologies; Goldsmith extolled the translations, and Johnson endorsed his views, though he himself liked the "Allegory on Man" best. And later censorship, which finds the "Hermit" not much more than a smooth and ingenious exercise in verse, and the translations and imitations unimportant, has lavished praise on two small pieces, "The Night-Piece on Death" and the "Hymn to Contentment," the former of which certainly displays nature-painting of a kind unknown in the work of any but one contemporary, while the return of the second to the Comus alternation of trochaic and iambic cadence is an almost equally important, though doubtless unintended, protest against the ceaseless iambs of the couplet. It is not possible to call Parnell a great poet as he stands; but the quality and the variety of his accomplishment show that in slightly different circumstances and in other times he would probably have been one.

Lady Winchelsea.

The other exception, a notice of whom may fitly conclude this chapter and this Book, was Anne, Countess of Winchelsea. Lady Winchelsea was the daugher of Sir William Kingsmill, and was born in Hampshire about the time of the Restoration. She died sixty years later, in 1720, having been a friend of the wits (she is Pope's Ardelia) and herself a considerable practitioner in verse. She wroter The Spleen, a Pindaric ode (1701), The Prodigy (1706), Miscellany Poems (1714), the publication which, almost by a lucky accident, has revived her memory, and a tragedy, Aristomenes. The accident referred to was the mention of her by Wordsworth in his famous polemical essay appended to the Lyrical Ballads in 1815, where he excerpts her Nocturnal Reverie (with an odd companion, Pope's Windsor Forest) from his sweeping denunciation of the poetry between Paradise Lost and The Seasons, as "not contaning a single new image of external nature." The statement is not by any means true, or rather its exaggeration swamps what truth it has, but the commndation of Lady Winchelsea is deserved. It is a pity that her poems have not been reprinted and are difficult of access, for it is desirable to read the whole in order to appreciate the unconscious clash of style and taste in them. (NOTE 1).

NOTE 1.The Reverie and some other pieces will be found in Ward's Poets, vol. iii.

It is not a little noteworthy that lady Winchelsea began as a Pindaric writer. The imitators of Cowley (unless Dryden is classed among them) have been not altogether unjustly regarded as having furnished one of the most uninviting divisions of English poetry, and it is no doubt in part due to them that the couplet, as a revolt, obtained its sway. But Cowley, though even in him the high and passionate stpirit of the earlier poetry was dropping and falling, still preserved something of it, and "flights" were necessary to a Pindaric. Fortunately for Lady Winchelsea, natural taste and the opportunities of life seem to have inclined her to take natural objects as the source of her imagery. What place suggested the Norcturnal Reverie we cannot say, but it  is clearly a corrected impression and not merely conventional. It is all seen: the waving moon on the river, the sleepy cowslip, the foxglove, paler than by day, but chequering still with red the dusky brakes, and the wonderful image of the horse, take us almost a century away from the drawing-rooms and the sham shepherdesses of her contemporaries. And she could manage the shortened octosyllable even better than Parnell, could adjust the special epithet (Pope borrowed or stole "aromatic pain" from her, though probably she took it from Dryden's "aromatic splinters"). Altogether she is a most remakable phenomenon, too isolated to point much of a moral, but adorning the lull of early eighteenth-century poetry with images even more correct than Thomson's, and put in language far less artificial.

—oOo—

Universal Criticism: Arbuthnot and Swift (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Louis Cazamian on John Arbuthnot and Jonathan Swift. From A History of English Literature, by E. Legouis and A. Cazamian (Classicism: The Spirit of Controversy):

Controversy begets controversy; it also produces scepticism. In the atmosphere of party strife and of the clashing of ideas, the average mind is drifting towards the lassitude, the jaded indifference which will mark the mid-years of the century.

With vigorous thinkers, who give themselves up wholly to their beliefs, and ardently live through their intellectual adventures, doubt cannot be superficial and easy to bear; the universal irony with which they envelop themselves, and which seems to dissolve all the disappointments of heart or brain into a mere play of the critical intellect, disguises but ill the inward torment born of a moral restlessness. One must not, in all probability, lay too much stress on the moral kinship between Swift and the Romanticists, who were inclined to recognize in him one of themselves. But one can see in him, along with the triumph of the rational lucidity with which classicism wanted to light up the correct order of life and art, the symptom of the inner uneasiness which a reason too well armed for destruction could not escape, while it only met on every side with rival negations.

[ARBUTHNOT]

John Arbuthnot, born in Scotland (1667), taught mathematics in London, then practised medicine; attached to the person of Queen Anne (1709), he played an important part under the Whig ministry (1710-14) and in 1712 wrote numerous pamphlets: The Art of Political Lying, The History of John Bull, etc. In 1713 he formed with Pope the Scriblerus Club, which produced the Memoirs of Scriblerus (published in 1741). After the death of the queen and the fall of his party (1714), he retired into private life, but continued to collaborate in the literature of the opposition, in a way that still remains obscure. He died in 1735. His Miscellaneous Works (1750) are only partly authentic. The History of John Bull, Cassell's National Library; ed. by H. Teerink, 1925. See Aitken, The Life and Works of Arbuthnot, 1892.

Arbuthnot is inseparable from Swift. He was his friend and lived in mental companionship with him; from the circle to which both belonged there issued works united by an affinity of inspiration, and many a hint whicvh others knew how to put to profit. A supple, alert, original, seed-sowing intelligence, he has influenced Swift to a greater degree than he has been influenced by him. Or less pronounced features, but not without a certain family resemblance, he deserves to be  remembered by the side of his great friend.

It is not easy to estimate the share of Arbuthnot in the common fund of ideas, images, symbols, and pleasantry to which not only he and Swift, but also Pope, Gay, and others contributed. His John Bull recalls in several places the Tale of a Tub; on the other hand, Gulliver's Travels owes its birth to Martinus Scriblerus, a general theme, no doubt of collective origin, but the most direct development of which seems to be due to Arbuthnot. As for the echoes and variations of this theme in the literature of the day, there still subsists about them a great deal of uncertainty.

One thing is clear, and that is the frame of mind to which these diverse works give expression. Keen and critical thinkers, instinct with the intellectual craving for realities, find themselves in contact with one another, mixed up with the politics of an age when all the devices of government are laid bare, when power is transferred to parties, when opinion, oficially in the ascendant, is subjected to all the caprices aroused in it by secret manœuvring; when public life is the triumph of insincerity and fraud. Stimulated by the analysis of the deceit which social appearances serve to cloak. Arbuthnot, Swift, Pope, and Gay encourage each other to the ironical search after false intellectual values. Before their tribunal are summoned wretched poets, false savants, quack doctors, pretentious scholars, humanists puffed up with bookish learning. A sort of general revision of science and art is instituted; and this universal criticism, so bold that it dares assail the superstitious obsession of ancient literatures, takes up again the charges of Hudibras against an obstinate scholasticism that will not die.

Like Butler's satire, Martinus Scriblerus exaggerates the whims, the oddities, the wrongs of pedantic ignoramuses, overlooking the soul of healthy curiosity that is often to be found in them; above all, it obstinately attacks adversaries who have been conquered time after time, and it pursued them under their already obsolete forms rather than under the new forms with which they manage to invest themselves. In this excellent fancy, there is a somewhat forced air of caricature. But the claims of intellect against foolishness are affirmed with a clear, robust, and sovereign good sense.

Arbuthnot has left his mark upon this common fund of doctrine. Through his John Bull also, his Political Lying, and the pictures of his personality that we find in the works of his friends, he possesses a distinct literary physiognomy. He has the gift of humour, transposes into impassive observation a full and concrete sense of the innumerable absurdities of life, and his sober art, vigorous, often bitter and realistic, recalls the tonality of that of Swift. A doctor, he knows the intimate connections of body and soul, and looks on the caprices of character from a physical point of view; and yet his vision of moral things is direct and profound; his portrait of John Bull has definitively drawn the first outline of this national English type. He has a creative imagination for allegory, and sustains the portraits of his symbolical characters with an accurate sense of the relationship between the sign and the thing signified. With him, experience and reflection have not soured the power of feeling, but have matured it into a humane and tolerant philosophy, the kindly radiation of which was felt by all who came near him. His rationalism is refined into a humility of the intelligence. He is a writer through the firmness, the precision, the incisiveness of his style; and his artistic invention has been fruitful. The figure of Martinus Scriblerus, ridiculous, pitiable, and obscurely appealing, and the episodes of his childhood, are additions to the unforgettable types of human comedy; Sterne remembered them in Tristram Shandy, Carlyle in Sartor Resartus.


[SWIFT]

Jonathan Swift, born in Dublin in 1667, came of a family of Yorkshire origin; lost his father at an early age, studied at Kilkenny and Trinity College, and was attached as secretary to Sir William Temple, until 1699. Already in 1696-7 he had written a great portion of A Tale of a Tub, and The Battle of the Books, published in 1704. It was at the home of Temple that he met Esther Johnson, the future Stella. He took orders, was appointed to the small living of Laracor in Ireland, but for the most part we find him in London, actively engaged in religious and political controversy. He defended the rights of the Irish clergy, and this led him to desert the Whig party for the other side, shortly before the Tory ministry of 1710. For a period of almost four years Swift, an intimate of Harley, was the influential adviser of the Government; collaborated in the Examiner (1711) and prepared public opinion for the peace with France (The Conduct of the Allies, etc.). Appointed Dean of St. Patrick's (Dublin) in 1713, he retired to Ireland on the fall of the Tories, whither he was followed by Hester Vanhomrigh (Vanessa), whom he had known in London; the false position of Swift between the two women who loved him, and of whom (it is possible, but improbable) he may have married one (Stella), was relieved by the death of Vanessa; that of Stella, in 1728, came as a still greater blow. He sympathized, meanwhile, with the sufferings of the Irish people, and wrote in their favour the Drapier's Letters (1724). Gulliver's Travels, which originated at a much earlier date, appeared in 1726, and had a great success, which, however, only brought greater suspicion upon the writer from a Government made uneasy by his satirical verve. His health, which had been failing for some time, grew worse; he was a victim of cerebral troubles and became more and more morose; after a few years of a life bordering on insanity, he died in 1745. Prose works, ed. by T. Scott, 1897-1908; Selections, ed. by Craik, 1892-3; Correspondence, ed. by Ball, 1910, etc.; A Tale of a Tub, etc., ed. by Guthkelch and Smith, 1920; The Battle of the Books, ed. by Guthkelch, 1908; Gulliver, ed. by Aitken, 1856; Craik, Life of Swift, 1882; Leslie Stephen, Swift, 1882; H. Cordelet, Swift, 1907; S. Smith, Dean Swift, 1910; R. F. Jones, The Background of the Battle of the Books, 1920; Vanessa and her Correspondence with Jonathan Swift, ed. by Freeman, 1921; Eddy, Gulliver's Travels, a Critical Study, 1923; E. Pons, Swift, la Jeunesse, le Conte du Tonneau, 1925; Carl Van Doren, Swift, 1931.

Swift is the greatest writer of the classical age by the force of his genius; the concern for art and the care of form are not in his case the essential motive of creation. His work owes an exceptionally broad scope to the freedom and penetration of its thought. He carries the rational criticism of values to a point where it menaces and impairs the very reasons for living. In his case, therefore, lucidity and the search for balance are suffused with an intellectual emotion, concentrated and intense, which at times cannot be distinguished from an impassioned bitterness, and the expression of which, despite the restraint of irony and humour, possesses a pathetic vehemence. Attaining thus to the utmost limits of satire, he leaves the normal, simple plane of a literature of reason; the stifled, repressed voices of sensibility and instinct, which reality in its baseness and cruelty afflicts with many wounds, supply the subdued accompaniment of soul-stirring chords to the clear accents of the intellect. And just as the language of Swift has this mixed tonality, so his thought goes beyond the stage of pure criticism; it finds itself at work conserving, if not constructing; it clings to the relative and provisional truths which can shelter the being of man. Beyond the spirit of classicism, of which he is the supreme mouthpiece, one perceives in Swift the latent powers of a virtual Romanticism; and further still, the audaciously humble solutions of the most modern wisdom.

It is permissible to think that these attenuations of the spirit of criticism, these voluntary sacrifices to good sense, are not the most original part of Swift's work. His practical adhesion to moral or social beliefs which his merciless perspicacity saw through and through is to all appearances a sincere act, and one which no logical need can lead us not to respect. But he has not explained the submission of his reason on principle; the lesson of his intellectual destiny is uncertain; his example, deprived of all contagious virtue, remains strictly individual and less fruitful. His life, with the shadow which overcasts it and keeps gradually thickening, is in spite of all more significant than the wholly superficial tranquillity of his mind. The moral figure of Swift is that of an eager demand for truth that destroys one by one all deceitful illusions, and of the suffering which accompanies that destruction. This demand has been carried far in all directions; further, it would seem, than it itself desired to go; further, perhaps, than it was aware of at times.

As a Church dignatary, mixed up in the controversies which separated the Anglicans from the dissenting sects, and within Anglicanism itself set several tendencies at variance with each other, Swift had to take a side. His career was a choice; he lived and died as Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin. He wrote numerous religious treatises, which one is usually too much inclined to overlook, besides doctrinal sermons, sensible and calm in tone; he acquitted himself scrupulously of the duties of his charge, and practised his religion, with more hidden regularity than apparent zeal. He recommends a judicious form of piety; extremes repel him, and his preferences lie in the observance of a golden mean; to follow the religion of the majority of one's country, is in Swift's opinion to act as a well-behaved man. He rails against the arguments of the Catholics, the strife and the fanaticism of the various sects; his nature leads him to embrace a doctrine of average reason. But he rebels with all his energy against the ambitious and rational attempt of Deism; he harshly refutes Collins. And in his reaction against the looseness of morals, he goes to the extent of extrolling, not without a suspicion of irony, the benefits accruing from a purely exterior and social submission to the attitude of belief, for hypocrisy is, after all, better than cynicism.

This is only a sudden outburst. Despite the conformity of his declarations and principles, analogous to that of a Voltaire, Swift stirred up a deep and secret unrest in the minds of those in power during his time, the patrons of Church and State; Queen Anne, above all a devout Churchwoman, refused to recognize his political services in a fitting way; the favourite of a minister, he did not obtain the bishopric he believed he could expect; at the critical moments in his life, an unkind destiny always seemed to baffle his desires; it was with the bitterness of a long series of disappointments that he withdrew from court intrigues. His great works, those in which his genius is laid bare, terrified or scandalized all orthodoxies; in A Tale of a Tub, his religious thought is instinct with a movement of pitiless negation; and the impulse which carries it on is too strong not to overthrow all the barriers which he himself would like to set up. In the preface which he wrote for this work, Swift is indignant that he should be classed among the Deists by superficial readers. To us of to-day, the error appears very natural. To point out shades and degrees of difference between the sects who contest each other's rights to represent the pure teaching of the Gospel, is to make it possible to select that which is least removed, on an average, from the sacred text; but such a choice is only a makeshift of resignations, the solution of despair; for too startling allegories picture to our eyes the unconscious or intentional work of human instinct, in all ages and in all the churches, bent on deforming, twisting, mutilating, contradicting the letter and spirit of the admirable and terrible message beneath which the flesh of man groans and faints.

And not only are religious organizations built up on half-conscious acts of cowardice, and the surrender of the highest aspirations of faith; but the very ardour which exalts the most enthusiastic of believers—the Quakers, the Ranters, and those Huguenots, refugees from France, who at this time are making a public show of their convulsions—is bound up with the turbid fermentations of animality. The Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit no doubt admits, in passing, that prophetic inspiration can be an immediate gift from the Godhead; but everything encourages the conjecture that this is a purely formal reserve; for an over-zealous spirit in religion, from the orgies of the ancients to the frenzies of the moderns, is called back with too mercilessly sharp an analysis, too keen an intuition of the deeper link between certain spiritual raptures and erotic moods, to the appetites alone of the flesh. The spirit of this treatise, under its form of concentrated irony, is that of a modern study of the pathology of mystic states. And with the taste for sound, even if bitter truth, there is mingled in it the keen and secret joy of a moral revenge, the protest of a free mind against conventional lies, even should these lies be sacred.

But the works of reason are treated with no better respect. The Battle of the Books is fired by an anger still aimed at a special object—at certain forms of intellectual ambition and error. Pedantry, false erudition, rabid controversy, are connected with the thesis of the 'moderns,' the insolent, mean enemies of the glory of the ancients; the despiser of Phalaris, Bentley—who yet was not wrong—is overwhelmed with classical contumely; the verve of this pamphlet, full as it is of allusions to the images and devices of the epic, is another example of the fecundity at this epoch of the mock-heroic theme. Gulliver's Travels singularly broadens the indictment of the very effort by which the human mind claims to know and understand. Philosophy appears in the light of an ambitious jargon; metaphysics, of a mystication; while theory, that sterile activity, shackles the efficient play of practice in all domains and in a hundred and one different ways. This satiric realism is given free scope in the painting of the illusory kingdom of Laputa. The fever of financial speculation, of rational inquiry, and already, of mechanical progress, which the society of that day freely shows, is presented as the agitated ardour of over-heated brains, in which an unceasingly hatched all manner of 'projects' and inventions, preposterous chimeras.

Swift does not seem to put any trust in science, either in its present or in its future; he derides equally the erudite interferences of Bentley, and Newton's theory of gravitation; these hypotheses, he holds, are the playthings of thought; fashion upholds them, and then they pass away. Like Samuel Butler, he joylessly witnesses, in the first flush of the modern age, the the awakening of the mental unrest which will produce the scientific conquest of the world; his attention, turned towards the past, is above all aware of the innumerable failures of scholastic charlatanry. The moderns, according to him, have added nothing which really matters to the sound reasoning added nothing which really matters to the sound reasoning of the ancients. His rational criticism of knowledge has not positive counterpart; it tends to scepticism.

It is less surprising to find only shadows in the images which Swift paints of political institutions and manners. His experience had revealed to him the hidden springs of power, the part played by corruption and intrigue. He writes on the opposition side, under the despised administration of Walpole. Elsewhere, in his didactic treatises, he shows himself alive to the necessity for a strong authority, sustained by the prestige of religion, and in its turn sustaining the spiritual hierarchy. While he has nothing about him of the uncompromising Tory, he is a friend of order. But Gulliver's Travels throws the light of a superior and destructive irony upon the smallness of the means, the vanity of the motives, the illusion of the catchwords, through which kings retain their thrones and magistrates their offices; and from one end of society to the other the fearful influence of man upon man is exercised. It is not only the English political life of his time which he thus dissects; the monarchy itself, the paraphernalia that surround it, the courts and courtiers, the debating assemblies, the struggles of parties, the wiles of the favourites of both sexes—everything upon which, in fact, rests the contemporary administration of Europe—is irremediably damaged by this corrosive satire. To serve the needs of his allegory, and in order to vary the perspective by reversing the scale of his transposition, Swift carries us from the country of the dwarfs to that of the giants; in the former, everything was the grotesque and despicable parody of that human reality which convention invests with an august prestige; in the latter, it is our reality which reveals itself, directly, as ridiculous and infinitely small. But Brobdingnag and its patriarchal manners are not an ideal seriously proposed to man; this fancy vanishes as soon as one grasps its thin texture; it is only invented to show us better our littleness, to crush us under a sense of our miseries. Whatever the standard chosen for the comparison, mankind cuts a sorry and ugly figure.

The reason is that it is in itself vile and corrupt. In order to realize ever so little the idea of a noble existence, Swift has to it that one must forsake the human species. Animal life will supply us with the figures of reasonable beings. In the land of the philosophical horses, we at last come upon something that in the countries known to us we have looked for in vain. When explained to these wise quadrupeds, our civilization is not intelligible to them; for our perversity surpasses all understanding. And in the lower depths of their civilized society, the ignoble race of two-footed monsters drags itself along; let us look at it without prejudice, and we shall recognize ourselves. What we call bestiality is the very attribute of man. With relentless cruelty, Swift drives our thought back towards the sordidness of physical existence. Here is an instinctive trend of his attention, almost an obsession of his fancy, of which his poems, like the great allegories, bear the traces, and which has been often connected with the morbid tendencies of his nature. No element in his work is more characteristic; none is better known, this delight in what is foul spreading itself out with cynical frankness on the very surface. In what measure have we here the sign and the germ of a pathological state? Or is it the need for the whole truth, a realism of mind, an ironic lesson of the moralist aimed at the vanities of mankind, a psychological and medical attention to what links up soul and body, or again the lucid, voluntary pessimism of a mind that is resolutely and cooly Christian? Nothing is more difficult than to attempt an exact answer to these questions.

On the other hand, there is among these elements one which dominates the others too much, which emanates too distinctly from all this work like a bitter essence, not to rightly serve to define it: pessimism. Swift does not pass judgment upon the universe or upon the world of man in the absolutely negative way which makes philosophic pessimism; his mind mistrusts general affirmations, and at the same time his status as a priest does not permit him, with regard to creation as a whole, to pronounce one of those explicit words of despair which faith reproves. Yet he is intellectually hostile to what exists; his emotions have a much larger share in his judgments when he condemns than when he accepts reality. His verdict on life is of the psychological and moral order. It bears upon the quality of men in themselves, and upon the use they make of the occasions to act which society offers.

It is in the souls that the evil lies; thence it is that it radiates over all the relations of human beings with one another. This pessimism is so clearly coloured by individual experience, that one has been able to see it in the generalized after-effect of the shocks felt by the sensibility, or more precisely by the ambition of Swift; it is so personal in its expression, that one is tempted to find in it the painful consciousness of an impaired psychological and mental health, the echo of inner sufferings which have ended by ruining the balance of a mind. Perhaps there is even at bottom the hidden influence of one of those secret sores of personality, the possible effects of which are revealed to-day by the study of subconscious states.

And yet, Swift has not been always the prey of this bitterness; at least, not to the same degree. His intimate life, and his literary life, both betray moments, or phases, of animation, of expansiveness, almost of gaiety. It is when he comes out of himself, out of his concentrated and solitary meditation, that his thought appears to relax. At the time in which he is wholly engrossed in political strife, from 1710 to 1714, Swift is carried onward by the tide of action. The Journal to Stella, a collection of letters in which he jots down familiarity the story of his life for the girl to whom he is attached by an affection that has remained rather mysterious, is one of the most taking documents of its kind; an effusion in which one catches the note of a strange temperament, somewhat ailing; but a not full of playfulness and tender puerilities. Whether it be the bustle of public affairs, or sentiment, which then occupies Sift more, something is lifting him above that fund of aggressive reflection to which A Tale of a Tub already bore witness.

Ireland also saved him at moments from this gnawing disquietude of mind. Deeply moved by the miserable lot of the country which saw his birth, which he does not look upon as his own, and for which he evinces a somewhat scornful sympathy, he at least knows how to speak out in its favour. He advises the Irish (1720) to reply to the economic pressure of the English by refusing to buy the products of their manufacture. In 1724, he publishes a series of Letters (signed 'M. B. Drapier') against the new copper currency which an Englishman had obtained the privilege of coining, and the weight of which did not correspond with its official value. With an admirable divination of the popular mind, he there wrote a language full of such simple and just sense, and roused so cleverly the mistrust of the practical instinct, that the Government had perforce to yield before a general protest. On this occasion, Swift was the accepted mouthpiece of a people; and he always remained proud of it.

In many subjects, his fertile talent as a polemist was able to expose with clearness and coolness the ideas of a lively and original but balanced judgment. There is in Swift a literary critic, a political writer, a theorist of the rights of the Church. But his work has a physiognomy as a whole; and it is right that its dominant traits should be furnished by the most marked characteristics of his genius. He is above all great by his allegorical invention as applied to satire, by his humour and irony, by the marvellous ease and precision of his style.

Irony and allegory are here fused into one. What is unique, is the suggestive power which radiates from the play of symbolical imagination; and more than in the symbols themselves, more than in the forms chosen to illustrate the theses, the interest here lies in the discovery of these forms, in the act of the mind which chooses them, which loads them with a meaning prodigiously rich and insulting. The apologues on which are founded A Tale of a Tub or The Battle of the Books have nothing original about them. Gulliver's Travels is first of all a novel of adventure and a tale of wonder, and as such is of no more value than many others; the sources utilized by Swift have been discovered or are suspected; in this domain he had a long series of predecessors. But the working out of these data is with him incomparable. The verve, the ingenuity, the concrete invention, which embroider these general themes with uninterrupted variations, give to the least detail a restrained and irresistible eloquence, and store it with a world of allusions; which also render the supernatural acceptable and normal; such are the elements of an art which Swift carries to the highest degree. And these elements themselves are derived: their common source is a passionate analysis which, with an indefatigable effort, scrutinizes reality, at the same time as it judges and condemns it with a harsh and angry feeling. The figured representations among which Swift's satire moves are like an embittered poetry, the value of which lies less in its form than in the philosophic meaning through which it develops and achieves itself.

An art of implicit expression, contained as to its methods, expansive as to its results, is by its main device closely akin to humour. It has usually been the custom to treat Swift as a master of irony, because his mockery has not the kindly aftertaste which would appear to be, according to some judges, the distinctive note of the humorist. But while his effects are very often more in the nature of irony—which depicts the ideal, and pretends to believe that it is real—they are also very often enlivened by humour—which depicts the real, and pretends to believe that it is ideal. The working of transposition, which is common to them, brings these two literary kinds very close together, and their boundaries are shifting. Swift likes to hover playfully over these limits, and to pass from one domain to the other. He is no less a master in one than in the other. He handles humour in a superior manner because being keenly alive to all the virtual value of the concrete, to all the reactions which the real sets up in our emotion or in our intelligence, he knows how to evoke it in all its crude force, to allow these reactions their widest play, and to efface himself entirely behind the the facts he presents to us, enhancing their eloquence with his impassibility. The best-known piece—the practical commercial proposal to utilize the flesh of Irish children as butcher's meat—has all the precision of an estimate and the calm of a financial statement.

Thus it is that Swift's style conveys the impression of a tense energy, but one which commands and directs itself. A morbid element may have been found in his thought; his personality is a problem which has not as yet, perhaps, revealed the whole of its secret; it certainly contains both grief and instability, a deep trouble which finally led to madness. But this anguish and this unrest are dominated by the force of an extraordinarily lucid intellect, of a will that knows how to govern passion even when it delivers itself up to it. Upon a temperament that possessed all the germs of moral incertitude, and which no doubt, in the following century, would have blossomed out into an ardent Romanticism, Swift builds up a work that is wholly classical in its form. The inner tension reveals itself only in the compactness of the expression, in the number of the intentions, in the restrained violence of some effects. Everything is clear in this style, despite the use made of allusion; it is bathed in an intellectual light; everything in it seems sound, normal, self-controlled. It is only in some familiar effusions, such as the Journal to Stella, that we meet with the signs of an oddity in the manner of writing and in the terms which is excessive, at time disquieting.

Everywhere else, the language is that of reason itself, of a reason that is sensible to reality, nurtured by it, and in no way abstract and dry. Swift possesses the concrete world, knows how to utilizae it, and here again he is the humorist. He knows how to employ the racy word, sometimes the coarse word; he frankly collides with the proprieties, or, as the case may be, veils the realism of his subjects with ironic periphrases. But the concrete facts of experience, as well as the ideas, the sentiments, and the shades of meaning, are enveloped, harmonized by the limpid flow of the most simple, vigorous and straightforward prose. Each word in its place, quite naturally; the most fitting word is always chosen, withoug effort, through an instinct that seems spontaneous. A great variety of tone is obtained by means of a supple adaptation of the language to the theme. If one remembers the extent of Swift's work, the ease with which it passes from the most naïve exposition to the pseudo-epic style, from the weightiest discussion to the freest pleasantry, the fact that the parts of his correspondence which were the most hastily dashed out are still astonishingly spirited and immediately, inevitably clear, one will the better gauge the greatness of the writer.


To be consulted: Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ix. Chaps. IV, V, VIII, IX, XIII; vol. x. Chap. XV; Bergson, Le Rire,  etc., 1900; W. H. Durham, Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-25, 1915; Elton, The Augustan Ages, 1899; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 1862; Hunt, Religious Thought in England, 1892; F. B. Kaye, ed. of Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 1924; Laski, Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham, 1921; Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 1812-15; Paston, Lady Mary Wortly Montagu and her Times, 1907; Pons, Swift, la Jeunesse, le Conte du Tonneau, 1925; De Rémusat, L'Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, 1856; Rigault, History of Free Thought, 1906; Saintsbury, History of Criticism, 1906; Sichel, Bolingbroke and his Times, 1902; Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1902.

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