BOOKS.
FROM STEELE AND A.pDisoisr TO POPE
AND SWIFT.*
Tun period which this rather misleading title suggests is a short one, and one which, on the first thought, does not promise a great variety of matter. 'In point of fact, the years between the birth of Addison and the death. of Pope were remarkable, as few other apochs.of English history have been, for the importance and variety of their literary output. It is, moreover, a time which deserves attention and analysis even beyond the merits.of its actual achievement, for in the shadow of the great names which dominated it there lie hidden not a few seedlings which were destined to outlive and to supplant the giants of satire and classicism to whom our world was so long tributary. In somecases it is in the giants themselves that the seeds are to be found. Steele and Addison did more than make the essay a living and almost perfect form of expression. It is in them that we find the first clear trace of that spirit of sentimental comedy which, found a permanent home in fiction through the influence of Sterne, and has dominated the English stage from. Cumberland's day to our own. Steele was, as Mr. Routh clearly shows in a thoughtful and well-reasoned chapter, the originator in both these respects, although ever since the first moment of their literary partnership the superior genius of Addison has to. a great extent eclipsed his own. But the claim which Mr. Routh also advances, that Steele only just missed discovering both the short story and the comedy novel, is less easy to substantiate. Indeed one suspects &halite suggestion by the learned author is, in some degree, due to the seduction of a personality which seems always able to captivate the judg- ment of the soberest modern historian. On the other hand, in his anxiety to lay sufficient emphasis on the moral tendencies of his favourite's plays,. Mr. Routh lays too little on those • The Cambrie140 History. of ieglith Litiratare. Vol. IX. Cambridge: At the Univ.reity Proo. lighter qualities which were the chief cause of their popularity, and led Sydney Smith to cite a Scene from " The Funeral " as a specimen of true humour. But Steele's was not the only voyage of discovery. Professor Trent, in the first chapter of the book, gives a clear account of the rise of the newspaper and the novel of manners under Defoe. In.history, Burnet was probably•the first writer to devote himself to a systematic study of original sources (one would have liked a closer com- parison of his methods with those of Clarendon than Dr. Ward has given us), and with him one may rank as students, if not as historians, the antiquaries Wood, Dugdale, Hearne, Aubrey, and Rymer. There is no need for more than a bare mention, of Bentley's tremendous services to scholarship, the modern science which lie may justly claim to have created, or of the stimulus which Berkeley's one great idea gave to the development of philosophy. And there were more subtle growths than these. Mr. Seccombe, in his chapter on the lesser verse-writers, rather fancifully calls the cult of the pastiche ballad by Mallet, Ambrose Phillips, and others, the " shoehorn which drew on the romantic revival:" There is some truth in the conceit, and an even clearer example of the same influence is to be found in the pioneer work of Allan Ramsay, whose labours in collecting (and too often debauching) popular Scottish songs proved so powerful a stimulus to Robert Burns. Indeed there was hardly a branch of national life in which the spirit of renovation was not at work. The increase of security and civilisation pro- duced in the letter a new form of literature, which, although it was not to reach its perfection until a generation—perhaps a century—later, might well have been given separate treat- ment in this volume. The memoir, another new growth which owed its origin to the same causes and showed as its first- fruits those grotesquely interesting characters Lord Hervey and Lady Ma.ry Wortley Montagu, is the subject of an excellent chapter by Mr. Seccombe.
Such is the scope of the present volume, and even though one may disagree with its conclusions here and there on a point of detail, the treatment throughontis wonderfully sound and full. One may think Mr. Seccombe a little too kind to Hughes and a little hard on Savage, whose " Bastard' and " 'Wanderer" have surely some true feeling and some of the genuine salt of satire. But it may be that, in all that welter of smooth and featureless insignificance with which the chapter on the lesser verse-writers is concerned, Hughes does present some features of comparative interest, and in the other case there is always a temptation to be hard where Dr. Johnson was so notoriously and romantically the opposite. But these are trifles, and need not prevent us admiring the zeal and discrimination with which Mr. Seccombe is able to weigh and balance the infinitesimal merits of those miracles of dulness, who owe whatever spark of recognition they still enjoy to a raummied survival in the tasteless " Readers " and anthologies of the mid-nineteenth century. Parnell, Tickell, Pomfret, Garth, Blackmorc, Yalden, Browne, Fenton, Aaron Hill, Christopher Pitt, surely they were the dullest dogs who ever spoilt paper; one is almost sorry to see so much learning squandered upon them.
But the consideration of these details brings us to what is really the fundamental weakness of . the book—the general method of arrangement which it shares with its sister volumes. As the subject grows more complex and far-reaching, the weakness of the method becomes more apparent. To begin with, it has been impossible to include in the present book all the various literary activities of the period. The drama, except for an incidental reference in connexion with Steele and Addison, is not treated at all, Congreve, Farquhar, Wycherley, Cibber, Rowe, Lanadowne, and Southerne, having all been included in "The Age of Dryden" (vol. viii.), and their successors being reserved for treatment in vol. x. Locke's educational work, on the other hand, is fully analyzed, though his general writings have been considered in a former volume, and other instances might be given. It will be seen, therefore, that the work is not strictly periodical in form. One need not regret this, for no strictly periodical form can be wholly satisfactory. Where the book really fails is in its lack of true historical sequence. Pope has surely more affinity to Dryden than to any of the three great names associated with his on the title-page. Yet there is no attempt to trace this literary kinship or the .development of the school of poetry which may be said to.have begun with the earlier and culminated in the later poet. The value of Garth and. his.
attendant train of nonentities lies in the stages which they mark upon this road of development, and in the mite they contributed to the restoration of the ballad and of blank verse. Yet these things receive only incidental notice. The aim seems to have been to make each chapter as encyclopaedic as possible. We exhaust the whole ragged retinue of literature. We are saturated with details of history, philosophy, antiquarianism, and even education. But where we look for a general illumination, we find only a succession of searchlights, in the bard and unvarying brightness of which thousands of tiny figures dance and weave monotonous and bewildering patterns. Here and there, of course, there is true historic treatment. Mr. Henderson's chapter on Scottish popular v'erse is excellent, and an equally good example is to be seen in Mr. Whibley's summary of the translators and burlesque writers, that strange pothouse regiment which lingered on as a last survival of Restoration licence in the face of the rapidly rising Puritan middle class, now beginning for the first time to find literary expression in the pages of its senti- mental moralists, Addison and Steele. Ned Ward, Tom Brown, and Peter Motteux are as dead to us now as the bottles they cracked together, but Mr. Whibley is still at home in their company, and he has done well to revive it for us.
. His chapter shows clearly the two threads 'of interest on which the development of this period hangs. There is on the one hand the development of style and of the purely literary ideal; on the other, and almost equally important, there is the social factor, the dominance of particular personalities, 'whether in coffee house or tavern, which did so much to conventionalize style and stimulate those feuds which were the forcing-ground of satire and polemic. A satisfactory history of the time must show clearly the growth and interaction of both these
forces, and it is just this continuity which it is most. difficult for what one may call the picnic method of history to achieve.
The contributors to the feast have ransacked their cupboards and there is no detail wanting, but it is all on the table together, and the guest -turns from dish to dish in pardonable bewilderment.
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