Prose in the Age of Reason

(From Anthony Burgess, English Literature, Longman, 1974)

16. Prose in the Age of Reason

Despite the interesting body of verse that the eighteenth century produced, the works that have worn best and that still hold the general reader most are in prose. Defoe and Swift and Fielding hardly seem to have dated, while Pope and his followers seem artificial to modern readers, and require to be looked at through the glass of 'historical perspective'.

Beginnings of Newspapers

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was a journalist, and that fact itself draws him to our own time. The development of the newspaper and the periodical is an interesting literary sideline of the seventeenth century. The Civil War undoubtedly stimulated a public appetite for up-to-the minute news (such news then was vital) and the Restoration period, with its interest in men and affairs, its information services in the coffee-houses, was developing that wider interest in news—home and foreign—which is so alive today. Defoe is, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical, purveying opinion more than news, and The Review, which he founded in 1704, is the progenitor of a long line of 'well-informed' magazines. Defoe did not see himself primarily as a literary artist: he had things to say to the public, and he said them as clearly as he could, without troubling to polish and revise. There are no stylistic tricks in his writings, no airs and graces, but there is the flavour of colloquial speech, a 'no-nonsense', down-to-earth simplicity. He was—like Swift—capable of irony, however, and his Shortest Way with the Dissenters states gravely that those who do not belong to the Church of England should be hanged. (Defoe himself was a Dissenter, of course). This pamphlet was taken seriously by many, but, when the authorities discovered they had been having their legs pulled, they put Defoe into prison.


Defoe novels

The most interesting of Defoe's 'documentary' works is the Journal of the Plague Year (one gets the impression that Defoe was actually present in London during that disastrous time, seriously taking notes, but a glance at his dates shows that this was impossible). But his memory is revered still primarily for his novels, written late in life: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and others. The intention of these works is that the reader should regard them as true, not as fictions, and so Defoe deliberately avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should concentrate only on a series of plausible events, thinking: 'This isn't a story-book, this is autobiography.' Defoe keeps up the straight-faced pretence admirably. In Moll Flanders we seem to be reading the real life-story of a 'bad woman', written in the style appropriate to her, In Robinson Crusoe, whose appeal to the young can never die, the fascination lies in the bald statement of facts which are quite convincing—even though Defoe never had the experience of being cast away on a desert island and having to fend for himself. The magic of this novel never palls: frequently in England a musical comedy version of it holds the stage during the after-Christmas 'pantomime season'.


Other journalists

Other journalists were Richard Steele (1672-1729) and Joseph Addison (1672-1719). Steele started The Tatler, and Addison later joined him, and their writings in this periodical had a moral purpose—they attempted to improve manners, encourage tolerance in religion and politics, condemn fanaticism, and preach a kind of moderation in all things, including the literary art. Addison comes into his own in The Spectator, started in 1711, and the most valuable articles of that paper are his. His big achievement is the creation of an imaginary club, its members representing contemporary social types, and one member has become immortal—Sir Roger de Coverley. Sir Roger is the old-type Tory, rather simple-minded, throroughly good-hearted, never for long away from his country estate, full of prejudices and superstitions which are meant to make us smile, but smile sympathetically. (Addison himself, by the way, was a Whig). Against Sir Roger is set the Whig merchant, Sir Andrew Freeport, a man of less charm than Sir Roger but of far more intelligence. Addison seems to point to a middle way in politics—there is much good in the old, and one should not scoff at the outmoded ideas of the Tories, but the Whigs stand with progress and with the lies the England of the future.Sir Roger is a fine creation, worthy to rank with any of the eccentrics of eighteenth-century fiction (such as Squire Western in Tom Jones). Addison's prose-style is an admirable compromise: it has the grace and polish of the artist, the ease and flow and simplicity of the journalist. If Addison has a fault, it lies in a certain sentimentality: he likes to provoke tears, and his humour has sometimes an over-gentle whimsicality that makes us long for stronger meat.


Swift 

The greatest prose-writer of the first part—perhaps the whole—of the century is Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). A great humorist and a savage satirist, his meat is sometimes too powerful even for a healthy stomach. He is capable of pure fun—as in some of his poems—and even schoolboy jokes, but there is a core of bitterness in him which revealed itself finally as mad hatred of mankind. On his own admission, he loved Tom, Dick, and Harry, but hated the animal, Man. Yet he strove to do good for his fellow-men, especially the poor of Dublin, where he was Dean of St. Patrick's. The Drapier's Letters were a series of attacks on abuses of the currency, and the Government heeded his sharp shafts. The monopoly of minting copper money, which had been given to a man called Wood, was withdrawn, and Swift became a hero. In his Modest Proposal he ironically suggested that famine in Ireland could be eased by cannibalism, and that the starving children should be used as food. Some fools took this seriously. His greatest books are A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels.

The first of these is a satire on the two main non-conformist religions—Catholicism and Presbyterianism. Swift tells the story of three brothers their inheritance (the Chistian religion). The story is farcical and at times wildly funny, but people of his day could perhaps be forgiven if they found blasphemy in it. It certainly shocked Queen Anne so much that she would not allow Swift to be made a bishop, and this contributed to Swift's inner frustration and bitterness.  


Gulliver

Gulliver's Travels hides much of its satire so cleverly that children still read it as a fairy story. It starts off by making fun of mankind (and especially England and English politics) in a quite gentle way: Gulliver sees in Lilliput a shrunken human race, and its concerns—so important to Lilliput—become shrunken accordingly. But in the second part, in the land of the giants, where tiny Gulliver sees human deformities magnified to a feverous pitch, we have something of this mad horror of the human body which obsesses Swift. (According to Dr. Johnson, Swift washed himself excessively—'with Oriental scrupulosity'—but his terror of dirt and shame at the body's functions never disappeared.) In the fourth part of the book, where the Houyhnhnms—horses with rational souls and the highest moral instincs—are contrasted with the filthy, depraved Yahoos, who are really human beings, Swift's hatred of man reaches its climax. Nothing is more powerful or horrible than the moment when Gulliver reaches home and cannot bear the touch of his wife—her smell is the smell of a Yahoo and makes him want to vomit.

Swift is a very great literary artist, and perhaps only in the present century is his full stature being revealed. He is skilful in verse, as well as in prose, and his experience continues: James Joyce—in his The Holy Office—has written Swiftian verse; Aldous Huxley (in Ape and Essence) and George Orwell (in Animal Farm) have produced satires which are really an act of homage to Swift's genius. Yet Gulliver's Travels stands supreme: a fairy story for children, a serious work for men, it has never lost either its allure or its topicality.


Religious writing

The first part of the century is also notable for a number of philosophical and religious works which reflect the new 'rational' spirit. The Deists (powerful in France as well as in England) try to strip Christianity of its mysteries and to establish an almost Islamic conception of God—a god in whom the persons of the Christian Trinity shall have no part—and to maintain that this conception is the product of reason, not of faith. On the other hand, there were Christian writers like William Law (1686-1761) and Isaac Watts (1674-1748) who, the first in prose, the second in simple pious verse, tried successfully to stress the importance of pure faith, even of mysticism, in religion. The religious revival which was to be initiated by John Wesley (1703-91) owes a good deal to this spirit, which kept itself alive despite the temptations of 'rationalism'. Joseph Butler (1692-1752) used reason, not to advance the doctrine of Deism, but to affirm the truths of established Christianity. His Analogy of Religion is a powerfully argued book. The most important philosopher of the early part of the century is Bishop Berkely (1685-1753), whose conclusions may be stated briefly: he did not believe that matter had any real existence apart from mind. A tree exists because we see it, and if we are not there to see it, God is always there. Things ultimately exist in the mind of God, not of themselves. He was answered later by David Hume (1711-76), the Scots philosopher, who could not accept the notion of a divine system enclosing everything. He ould see little systems in the universe: he begins and ends with human nature, which links together a series of impressions, gained by the senses, by means of 'association'. We make systems according to our needs, but there is no system that really exists in an absolute sense. There is no ultimate truth, and even God is an idea that man has developed for his own needs. This is a closely argued kind of sceptical philosophy, very different from Berkeley's somewhat mystical acceptance of reality's being the content of the 'Mind of a God'.


Richardson

The novel develops, after the death of Defoe, with Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), a professional printer who took to novel-writing when he was fifty. Richardson liked to help young women with the composition of their love letters, and was asked by a publisher to write a volume of model letters for use on various occasions. He was inspired to write a novel in the form of a series of letters, a novel which should implant a moral lesson in the minds of its readers (he thought of these readers primarily as women). This novel was Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, which describes the assaults made on the honour of a virtuous housemaid by an unscrupulous young man. Pamela resists, clinging tightly to her code of honour, and her reward is, ultimately, marriage to her would-be seducer, a man who, despite his brutishness, has always secretly attracted her. It is a strange sort of reward, and a strange basis for marriage, according to our modern view, but this moral persists in cheap novelettes and magazines even today—a girl makes herself inaccessible before marriage, and the man who has tried to seduce her, weary of the lack of success, at last accepts her terms. Richardson's Clarissa is about a young lady of wealth and beauty, virtue and innocence, who, in order to avoid a marriage which her parents are trying to arrange, seeks help from Lovelace, a handsome but, again, unscrupulous young man. Lovelace seduces her. [Actually he rapes her—JAGL.] Repentant, he asks her to marry him, but she will not: instead, worn out by shame, she dies, leaving Lovelace to her remorse. This is a more remarkable novel thatn it sounds: close analysis of character, perhaps for the first time in the history of the novel, looks forward to the great French novelists, Flaubert and Stendhal, and Lovelace has a complexity of make-up hardly to be expected in the literature of the age. Sir Charles Grandison is Richardson's third novel: its hero, full of the highest virtues, wondering which woman duty should compel him to marry, is anaemic and priggish. (A hero should have something of the devil in him.) This novel is far inferior to the other two.


Fielding

The greatest novelist of the century is Henry Fielding (1707-54). He started his novel-writing career, like Richardson, almost by accident. Moved to write a parody of Pamela, he found his Joseph Andrews developing into something far bigger than a mere skit. Joseph, dismissed from service because he will not allow his employer, Lady Booby, to make love to him, takes the road to the village where his sweetheart lives, meets the tremendous Parson Adams—who then becomes virtually the hero of the book—and has many strange adventures on the road, meeting rogues, vagabonds, tricksters of all kinds, but eventually reaching his goal and happiness ever after. With Fielding one is inclined to use the term picaresque (from the Spanish pícaro, meaning 'rogue'), a term originally applicable only to novels in which the leading character is a rogue (such as the popular Gil Blas by Le Sage, published between 1715 and 1735). It is a term which lends itself to description of all novels in which the bulk of the action takes place on the road, on a journey, and in which eccentric and low-life characters appear. Don Quixote is, in some ways, picaresque; so is Priestley's The Good Companions. Fielding's Jonathan Wild is truly picaresque, with its boastful, vicious hero who extols the 'greatness' of his every act of villainy (his standards of comparison are, cynically, provided by the so-called virtuous actions of great men) until he mees his end on the gallows or 'tree of glory'. Tom Jones is Fielding's masterpiece. It has its picaresque elements—the theme of the journey occupies the greater part of the book—but it would be more accurate to describe it as a mock-epic. It has the bulk and largeness of conception we expect from an epic, and its style sometimes parodies Homer:

Hushed be every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas, and the sharp-pointed nose of bitter-biting Eurus. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy fragant bed, mount the western sky, and lead on those delicious gales, the charms of which call forth the lovely Flora from her chamber, perfumed with pearly dews...

And so on for several hundred words, until eventually we are introduced to the charming, but not quite Homeric, Sophia Western, heroine of the novel and beloved of the quite ordinary but quite likable hero, Jones himself. The novel introduces a rich variety of characters, contains certain shrewd moral observations, and has an acceptable philosophy—liberal and tolerant, distrustful of too great enthusiasm, recognising the social conventions, but much concerned with reform of the law. (It was Fielding's liberalism which helped along the reform movements of the end of the century.) But we appreciate Tom Jones most for its boisterous humour, its good sense, and its vivid characterisation.


Smollett

Tobias Smollett (1721-71) is responsible for Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker. The first gives us an insight into the life of the British Navy, which Smollett knew at first hand, having served as a ship's surgeon. The vice and brutality are vividly portrayed, but the satirical tone of the whole book seems to rob it somehow of the force of an indictment—exaggeration is Smollett's technique, not the direct 'reportage' of Defoe. But we are intrended to take the novel as entertainment, not as propaganda, nad as entertainment it is superb, though strong meat. It is the first of a long line of novels about life at sea, a line which can boast distinguished names like Conrad and Herman Melville. Peregrine Pickle is a gentler tale of sailors living on land, and Humphry Clinker, which reverts to Richardson's technique of presenting the story in the form of a series of letters, is less a novel than a travel-book—an account of a journey thorugh England and Scotland made by a framily from Wales, the letters presenting strongly the distinctive personalities of the writers. What little plot there is centres on a couple of love-affairs and the discovery that Humphry Clinker—servant of the family making the tour—is really the son of Mr. Bramble, the grumpy but golden-hearted head of the family.


Sterne

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) produced a remarkable and eccentric novel in his Tristram Shandy, which breaks all the rules, even of language and punctuation, and deliberately excludes all suggestions of a plot, so that—despite the considerable length of the book—nobody gets anywhere, nothing really happens, and the hero does not succeed even in getting born until half-way through! The author deliberately hinders all movement: just when we think a story is about to develop, Sterne introduces an incredible digression—a long piece of Latin (with translation on the opposite page), a blank sheet, a page with a marbled design on it, a collection of asterisks—anything to obstruct or mystify. Yet characters emerge: the learned Mr. Shandy, the gentle old soldier Uncle toby and Trim, his corporal (these last two spend much time reconstructing the battle of Namur on a bowling-green). There are lewd jokes, patches of sentimentality—often saved, just in time, from becoming mawkish by an ironical stroke—and grotesque Rabelaisian episodes. (Sterne looks back to Rabelais and forward to James Joyce.) Sterne's Sentimental Journey is an account of travels through France and Italy, and here tears are shed freely—especially over animals, Sterne being perhaps the first of the English 'poor-dumb-beast' sentimentalists. It was through the copious shedding of tears of pity and sympathy, in writers like Sterne, the the humanitarianism which is now said to be a great characteristic of the English was able to develop. Sentimentality may injure art, but it can improve life.


Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith, whom we have already met as poet and playwright, contributed to the development of the English novel a country ideyll called The Vicar of Wakefield. There is sentimentality here, too, in the portrait of the good Dr. Primrose, so good-hearted, so simple-minded, brave in adversity and tolerant and forgiving, but there is characteristic humour also, as well as the lyric gift:

When lovely woman stoops to folly
    And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
    What art can wash her tears away?

Late C18 Background

We are trying to trace the course of eighteenth-century prose in fairly strict chronological order. The novels we have just glanced at—from Pamela to Humphry Clinker—eover thirty years, from 1741 to 1771. other prose of the time includes attempts at History (Hume produced a History of Great Britain and William Robertson a History of Scotland, and even Smollett and Goldsmith tried their hands), many interesting collections of letters—including those of Lord Chesterfield to his son, and the vast correspondence of Horace Walpole—and the first book on Economics. This last, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1723-90), lies outside our scope, but we, whose study is literature, can praise it for its brilliance of style, even if we are not concerned with its content. Economics was later to become a 'dismal science', but Smith is not only elegant in the exposition of his revolutionary theory, but even prophetic: his book appeared in 1776, on the very day of the American Declaration of Independence, and it says of the Americans: 'They will become one of the foremost nations of the world.'

The last decades of the eighteenth century were shaken by great political changes. America broke away from England, and, in 1789, the French Revolution took place. English thinkers and politicians were much agitated, taking sides, preaching for and agianst the new violent movements, and a good deal of the prose of this last period is concerned with such watchwords as Liberty, Anarchy, Justice, William Godwin (1756-1836) wrote a book about Political Justice, preaching a kind of anarchy, extolling the light of pure reason as it comes to the individual soul, denouncing law and marriage and property because these interfere with individual freedom. HIs book had a great influence on Romantic poets like Shelley. Tom Paine (1737-1800) had previously defended the revolt of America, and he now defended, in his Rights of Man, the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke (1729-97), despite his Liberalism, attacked this same Revolution, and stated that tradition was more important than rational political theories—society was like a plant or a human body, growing, working out its salvation according to laws of its own, and it was dangerous to interfere with that process.


Gibbon

This period produced the great historian, Edward Gibbon (1737-94), whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire reached completion in 1788, a year before the fall of the Bastille. This is a great achievement, written in the most polished prose of the age, and it surveys about thirteen centuries of European history—from the reign of the Emperor Trajan to the fall of Constantinople, covering the rise of Christianity and Islam, the great migrations of the Teutonic peoples, and analysing the forces which turned the old world into the modern world. It is not a compassionate work: it chastises man for his follies much more than it extols his discoveries and virtues, and exhibits more of the author's personality than is perhaps proper in a history; but for literary skill and width of scope it is perhaps still unsurpassed among the larger historical studies.


Fanny Burney

The later days of the eighteenth-century novel produced names like Fanny Burney (1752-1840), whose Evelina and Cecilia are realistic, humorous, and full of credible characters. But much more typical of the age are those novels of terror which Horace Walpole ushered in, and novels which showed the influence of the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau.


Rousseau

Rousseau (1712-78) was one of the forerunners of the Romantic movement, and also one of the prophets of the French Revolution. He was by nature a rebel—against existing conceptions of religion, art, education, marriage, government, and in book after book he propounded his own theories on these subjects. Rousseau advocated a return to nature. In the natural state, he held, man is happy and good, and it is only society that, by making life artificial, produces evil. His Émile, a treatise on education, advocated that children should be brought up in an atmosphere of truth, and it condemned the elaborate lies that society imposed on the average child—including myths and fairy-stories. The result, in England, was a whole series of instructive books for children (including the incredibly priggish Sandford and Merton of Thomas Day) which was only broken by the thoroughly fanciful, and much healthier, children's book of men like Thackeray and Lewis Carroll in the nineteenth century. It was Rousseau's doctrine of the noble 'natural men', and his attack on the corrupting power of civilisation, that produced novels by minor writers like Bage, Holcroft, and the Caleb Williams of William Godwin, in which the spirit of revolt is expressed through central characters who have no religion or morality (like the hero of Bage's Hermsprong) or, like Godwin's hero, are a living witness to the corruption of a society in which the evil flourish and the good are victimised.


Gothic novels

There were novels of 'mystery and imagination' by writers like Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1822) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), who followed the example set in 1764 by The Castle of Otranto—a 'Gothic' story by Horace Walpole (1717-97). (This term 'Gothic' is primarily an architectural one, denoting that kind of European building which flourished in the Middle Ages and showed the influence of neither the Greeks nor the Romans. Gothic architecture, with its pointed arches, began to come back to England in the middle of the eighteenth century—Walpole himself built a 'little Gothic castle' at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, London. This kind of building suggested mystery, romance, revolt against classical order, wildness, through its association with medeaeval ruins—ivy-covered, haunted by owls, washed by moonlight, shadowy, mysterious, and so on.) The Castle of Otranto is a melodeamatic curiosity; Mrs. Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian are skilfully written hermysteries always have a rational explanation at the end, and she never offends conventional morality. Lewis's The Monk—with its devils, horror, torture, perversions, magic, and murder—is very different: its lack of taste does not compensate its undoubted power, and its popularity was understandably short-lived. We ought to mention in this context a work produced a good deal later—Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851). This was written during a wet summer in Switzerland, when her husband (the poet) and Lord Byron were amusing themselves by writing ghost-stories and she herself was asked to compose one. She could never have guessed that her story of the scientist who makes an artificial man—by which he is eventually destroyed [persecuted, rather—JAGL]—would give a new word to the language, and become so well known among even the near-illiterate (thanks chiefly to Hollywood) that its subject would rise from humble fiction to universal myth.


Johnson

I have reserved to the end of this chapter mention of the man whose personality seems to dominate the whole of the Augustan Age—Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84). Boswell's biography—perhaps the finest biography ever written—gives so vivid and detailed a portrait of the 'Grand Cham of Literature' and his times, that Johnson the person has, from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, tended to overshadow Johnson the writer. There are a thousand people who can uote one of Johnson's conversational sallies to one who can give a sentence from The Rambler or a line from London. When Johnson the writer is quoted, it is usually something to his disparagement that we hear, like the tautological opening of The Vanity of Human Wishes:

Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru,

or some extreme example of his highly Latinised style. Yet Johnson is worth reading. He attempted most of the literary forms of the day—drama, poetry (lyrical and didactic), the novel (his Rasselas is in the Oriental tradition, like Beckford's Vathek, and has the same sort of theme as Voltaire's Candide), and the moral essay, as in The Rambler and The Idler. He wrote sermons, prayers and meditations, admirable biography (The Lives of the Poets), dedications, prologues, speeches, political pamphlets—he leaves few branches of literature, journalism, and 'current affairs' untouched. But his name as a scholar will live chiefly because of his Dictionary of the English Language and his critical writings. The Dictionary is a great achievement—a work that can still be consulted, and, for the light it throws on Johnson's personality, even read. Johnson the critic is best met in The Lives of the Poets (especially in the Life of Cowley, where he has wise things to say about the Metaphysical Poets, and the long essay on Milton)and the preface to his edition of Shakespeare. The following may seem cruel, but there is truth in it:

A quibble is, to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. . . .  A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. . . . A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.

Johnson was incapable of giving veneration to any writer just because of that writer's reputation. As a critic he was honest, and honesty and independence shine throughout all his writings, as they shine throughout the record of his personal career. To an understanding of the whole of the eighteenth-century literary world, Boswell's Life of Johnson is indispensable. In it we meet all the writers we have been hearing about—Goldsmith, Sheridan, Burke, and the rest—and, more than that, we get the 'feel', the very smell, of the Augustan Age. It is a remarkable record of a remarkable era.

Queen Anne Prose