MR. GOSSE'S HISTORY OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE.* IT will be remembered
that in the course of last year, Mr. Saintsbury published a History of the Literature of the Elizabethan age ; and now Mr. Gosse, taking up the pen where his predecessor laid it down, gives the reader his judgment of a period less rich, indeed, in great names, but not the less interesting, perhaps, on that account to the student of literature. It will be obvious that so large a subject cannot be adequately treated in a volume of four hundred pages, and Mr. Gosse's work, like that of Mr. Saintsbm7, must be re- garded as a sketch rather than a history. As a book for
• A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature (1880-1780). By Edmund Gomm, M.A. London: Macmillan and Co.
popular use, it has many obvious merits. It is concise in style, genial in tone, and free from critical eccentricity.
A History of Literature extending from 1660 to 1780 is strikingly distinguished from the history of an age that em- braced such giants as Shakespeare and Spenser, Bacon and Hooker, Jeremy Taylor and Milton. The era that opens with Dryden and closes with Johnson and Goldsmith is the age of rhetoric and wit and satire, of the essay, the novel, and the political pamphlet. Never, too, before or since, has there been produced such a mass of versification that has no claim to the name of poetry. It is the despair of the student who finds the gravest prose writers of the period lively in comparison with the men of rhyme. Some of the eighteenth-century philosophers occupy the front rank, but they belong to the history of thought rather than of literature, and Mr. Gosse confines his attention, for the most part, to writers whose claim to be regarded as men of letters is based upon style. Of the great theologians of the century he says little, and apparently knows little.
Dryden was the first great author whose work, whether in verse or prose, has a modern flavour. He eschewed the per- verse conceits of poets like Donne and Cowley, Crashaw and Herbert, and carried the reader along a broad and open road, instead of through a thicket. And this clearness of expres- sion is to be found in the principal writers of the succeeding age,—in Swift and Addison, in Goldsmith and Hume, in Berkeley and Fielding. Pope, too, can boast of the same virtue. To this day, there is not a poet in the language, excepting Shakespeare, who is so frequently quoted, or who, as a master of pointed sayings, is so pertinent to quote. Mr. Gosse says truly that, with his superior lightness of intellect, the younger poet has moulded the heroic couplet more thoroughly to his purpose than Dryden ever did, " first polishing it to the extreme of mellifluousness, and then teaching it to ring and sparkle with the utmost rapidity and brilliance." And he adds that Pope's use of the iambic distich is so perfect that it has been impossible since his day to use that form without seeming intentionally to compete with him. Mr. Gosse, by-the-way, considers that Pope paid Fenton and Broome not illiberally for their share in the translation of the Odyssey. Pope received more than £4,500 for the work, and paid Broome and Fenton £770 for half the translation and the whole of the notes. It may have been a fair market price, but Pope's conduct in the transaction was not a little discreditable, and Broome does not come out of it with clean hands. In a postcript at the end of the Odyssey, Pope claimed to have done more of the work than fell to his share, and to have paid £130 a book instead of £50. "He robbed us of seven of our books," Broome writes to Fenton; but he had no right to complain ; since, much to Fenton's indignation, he had allowed the lying paragraph to pass for truth.
It is, to say the least, an awkward arrangement on the part of Mr. Gosse to class together "Swift and the Deists" in his fifth chapter. Swift owes all his fame to his humour, to his invention, to his masculine vigour of style, to his genius as a satirist. He was an ecclesiastic, but he was not a theologian, and his opinions, whether sound or otherwise, are of no con- sequence in a literary estimate of his style. Mr. Goose very wisely does not trouble himself about them, and yet he places Swift and his brilliant friend Arbuthnot in the same boat with Shaftesbury and with Bolingbroke. Another chapter-heading is also of doubtful propriety, and the reader will ask with surprise why lloadly, Berkeley, and Dr. Samuel Clarke are ranked with "Defoe and the Essayists." Defoe, the most indefatigable and the most voluminous author of his century, lives, like many other copious writers, on the fame of one or two books. Robinson Crusoe for popularity probably stands next to The Pilgrim's Progress, and The History of the Plague (which Mr. Gosse miscalls The Plague Year) is a masterpiece of realistic fiction. But Defoe's minor novels, wonderful as in some respects they are for invention, are so devoid of imagina- tion, and deal so exclusively with the mean side of human nature, that the reader turns from their close atmosphere with a sense of oppression, and almost of disgust. We cannot agree with Mr. Gosse that Defoe has no pathos. There is a passage describing the accidental meeting of a mother with a son whom she has not seen since his childhood which is intensely pathetic ; but generally he is wanting in emotion and passion, and moves on a low level. His tales, always excepting Robinson Crusoe, leave a bad taste in the mouth. In Mr. Gosse's judgment, Defoe is more like M. Zola than any other English writer.
The chapter entitled " The Dawn of Naturalism in Poetry " has much in it to interest. Readers are apt to forget that Pope and Thomson were contemporaries, and that Thomson, who owes all his fame to an exquisite perception of natural beauty, had probably as wide a popularity as the author of The Dunciad. The poetry of wit and satire and moral reflec- tion, of which Dryden and Pope were the supreme masters, was not suffered, except for a brief season, to occupy the whole field of verse, and the year that saw the publication of The Dunciad in its first form, witnessed also the publication of Thomson's Spring. Thomson is the most unequal of poets, and it is difficult to imagine the same writer producing such an exquisite poem as The Castle of Indolence and a poem so flat, prosaic, and unprofitable as Lthei-ty. He had the faults of his age, and his style is often tumid ; but in the direct observation of Nature he is not surpassed even by Cowper ; and if imagination linked to exquisite music is a poet's highest gift, The Castle of Indolence (published in 1746) entitles Thomson to take the first rank among the poets who flourished between the death of Dryden and the middle of the last century. " The opening stanzas," says Mr. Gosse, " are more like the work of Keats than any other verse which the eighteenth century has given us, and in their music there is less of the dull undertone of the conventional manner of the age than anywhere else, except in the finest lines of Gray and Collins." Whatever there is, indeed, between 1700 and 1780, of the high imagination that owes its source to Nature, is to be found in these three poets ; but we cannot agree with Mr. Gosse that Collins was of the type of the poet who sings as the birds do, because he must. With one or two exceptions, his poems display the subtlest art ; and though he wrote an " Ode to Simplicity," that virtue is not the predominant feature of his imaginative and scholarly odes. However, it is but fair to add that Mr. Gosse has Mr. Swinburne on his side, whom writes of Collins as " a solitary song-bird among many more or less excellent pipers and pianists."
When Dorothy Osborne was writing love-letters to Sir William Temple, she recommended him to read The Grand Cyrus, in ten volumes, with which she was " hugely pleased." Mademoiselle de Scuderi's romances, Roger Boyle's Parthenissa, and other long-winded fictions formed almost the sole litera- ture for a lady's leisure hours until the appearance of the Tatter and Spectator, and of Richardson's novels between twenty and thirty years later. The English essay and the English novel, as we have already observed, were both born in the eighteenth century, and are among its most notable literary products. It must have been the dearth of the land that made Pamela so welcome, but Clarissa Harlowe made Richardson immortal ; and it is remarkable that the most profound tragedy ever conceived by a novelist, and a picture of life so vigorous and humorous as Tom Jones, which, in the judgment of some critics is, despite all its defects, the greatest novel not only of its own century but of ours, should have been created in what, as far as England is concerned, must be called the dawn of the art. Mr. Goose considers that Clarissa is one of the most lifelike of all the women in literature, and his admiration of Fielding's masterpiece is unbounded. Unfortunately, neither Richardson, in spite of his moral pm-pose, nor Fielding, with his manly cheerfulness of tone, can be read in our day with unreserved pleasure. Coleridge may be right in saying that Fielding is the healthier of the two ; but when Mr. Gosse states that there is remarkably little to cavil at in Tom Jones, and that every one ought to read a story in which we " find ourselves moving among the healthiest company ever devised by a human brain," it would almost seem that he regards the novel as fitted for what is called " family reading." Tom Jones himself is a poor hero for a novel. Against him, in the words of Thackeray—and who ever admired Fielding's genius more P- " we have a right to put in a protest and quarrel with the esteem the author evidently has for that character." Mr. Gosse is not altogether happy in his remarks upon Fielding, and there is a painful effort to say a fine thing when, after commenting on Amelia, he observes that " the end Was near, and the Atlantean novelist who had squandered the rich treasure of his youth was already bowed under the orb of his fate."
The History ass many merits, and will not be read with the less pleasure because the reader may have'occasionally to ques- tion the author's opinion. In criticisms that range over so large a period, it is probably inevitable that some should appear to be superficial and others of doubtful value; but a student familiar with the subject will agree, we think, in the verdict that Mr. Gosse's sketch of a singularly distinct literary period is the fruit of careful reading, and in the main of sound judgment.
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