THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

DRYDEN bridges the space between the Puritans and the eighteenth century. The period from his death, 1700, to the publication of the "Lyrical Ballads," 1798, is sometimes divided into the Age of Pope and the Age of Johnson, but the same general literary tradition held throughout the century, and the whole time may therefore, for want of an exact and comprehensive term, fitly be called The Eighteenth Century. Its great characteristic was its sane, unimaginative reasoning, and its great contribution was its development of English prose.

The chief interests of men during this century, more particularly during the first part, were in the city. All important English life centred around London. Newspapers were started,1 and great advances in commercial prosperity were made. Yet this life was for the most part a very superficial, frivolous one, and the cardtable, the sedan-chair, the patch and the periwig, the coffee-house and the levee figure largely in the interests of the day. Following a model of etiquette and elegance, but not of profound thought, men, generally speaking, ceased to think greatly for themselves. No burning questions of "God, immortality, freedom" consumed them. If they looked within, they found reflected there only the shallowness of the life about them. Each one thought. his first duty was to cut an elegant figure in this world; a display of violent emotion or fresh ingenuousness was

1 There had been newspapers a few years before the turn of the century, but their real development belongs to the time of Queen Anne.

a sign of a lack of polish. There was, to be sure, beneath this superficial refinement, something of the coarseness and rudeness of Restoration England. To a Frenchman the Englishman of Queen Anne's day was still largely a boor, beaf-eating, hard-drinking, profane, violent. Nor was London a model of cleanliness and well-ordered beauty. Though there had been vast improvements since the great fire, most of the streets were crooked and without light by night; the sewage was discharged down a gutter in the middle of the street; there were no sidewalks, and the posts which protected the pedestrian from being knocked down did not shelter him from a shower of mud on a wet day. At night the single wayfarer ran a good chance of being beaten and robbed by city highwaymen or by a band of disorderly youths who dubbed themselves Mohawks. In no other age, nevertheless, has restraint and formality so got the better of the English nation. There was, in spite of much fundamental rudeness, an unmistakable grace and urbanity about the city gentlemen of two hundred years ago.

As men followed rules and correctness in social matters, as they too often considered form of greater importance than substance, so in their literature they tended towards lifeless conformity. Dryden, as has been seen, gave to literature the new direction, after the French model, along the lines of correctness and polish at the expense of naturalness. But what in Dryden was only tendency became, in the writers of the eighteenth century, a confirmed habit, and mere skill and deftness passed frequently for poetic genius. Poetry was made, to a great extent, after a geometrical pattern-like the trim gardens at Versailles. Only one poet, in fact, was

conspicuously great. He, however, exercised a sway over English verse which rivaled the influence of Chaucer. In his hands the heroic couplet reached perfection, and for fifty years after him it was the chief form of poetic expression. The Queen Anne Age, however, was distinctly an age of prose and reason. In the essay lies its special fame. In fact, prose, tentative until Dryden, first began to hold its own with poetry under Addison and Swift. And satire, it must not be forgotten, whether in verse or prose, was by far most successfully handled in the early eighteenth century.

In the second half of the century, under the Georges, life became again more openly vulgar; the veneer of delicacy was worn thin. Literature, however, with the exception that it lost some of its terseness and sparkle, carried on the tradition set by Addison and Pope. The chief interest, of course, centres around Dr. Johnson, with whose name are grouped those of such powerful writers as Goldsmith, Gibbon, and Burke; but the real contribution of the second half of the century was the novel, which had never reached any considerable maturity before the work of Richardson and Fielding.

This century, more particularly the earlier part, has often been called "The Augustan Age," because of its almost pathetic attempt to copy the "Golden Age" of Virgil and Horace. On account of such imitative work the epithet "pseudo-classic" has been not inappropriately applied to the literature of the day. Yet it must not be forgotten that it had a worth of its own, borrowed from no other people or time; the prose of the century stands on its own merits.

DANIEL DEFOE

THE life of Defoe is full of contradictions. In the first place, nothing could have been more characteristic of the Augustan Age in which he lived than his political pamphleteering and clever satire. Yet nothing could have been more un-Augustan than his carelessness of form and his great versatility. Again, he was in most of his writings a moralist, sometimes obtrusively so. Yet no writer of distinction has ever descended to greater trickery. Furthermore, he made a business of politics and succeeded in spite of many difficult, unexpected situations. Yet in all his business pursuits he was a theorizer and sooner or later a financial fail

ure.

Defoe's fame to-day rests, of course, on his great novel, Robinson Crusoe; but novel-writing was only one side of a very active life. He conducted magazines and wrote for them, he made poetry, composed treatises, and all through his life poured out a large stream of political pamphlets. Added to this, he was very closely involved in politics for twenty years, and he tried his hand at many forms of business. He had the versatility of an Elizabethan, but none of the splendor. He was a kind of squalid, calculating Ralegh in an age when large designs and noble deeds were rare. Defoe's duplicity, however, is not always easy to detect; indeed one often feels he did not always detect himself. He soon learned, without reliable friends and with a half

unconscious selfishness, to manage cleverly for himself; as Mr. Minto has put it, he was a man of "incomparable plausibility."

Very little is known of Defoe's earlier years. He was born in 1661, in the parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate. His father, James Foe, was a butcher. The son was sent to Mr. Morton's Academy in Newington Green, with the intention that he should prepare for the dissenting ministry. How much learning he got there is altogether conjectural, for the thousand and one bits of knowledge which he later so ingeniously turned to account might have been picked up anywhere by so active a mind. University men taunted him with ignorance, and Swift referred to him as 66 an illiterate fellow, whose name I forget." In 1705 he challenged John Tutchin "to translate with him any Latin, French, or Italian author, and after that to retranslate them crosswise for twenty pounds each book." That Tutchin declined the challenge is not so significant of Defoe's scholarship as of Defoe's readiness to meet an issue. Some years later he cleverly defended his learning in Applebee's Journal. "For, said I, here's a man speaks five Languages and reads the Sixth, is a master of Astronomy, Geography, History, and abundance of other useful Knowledge (which I do not mention, that you may not guess at the Man, who is too modest to desire it), and yet, they say this Man is no Scholar."

After five years at Newington, the young Dissenter left the academy without entering the ministry. He followed for a while the trade of hosier-evidently as a kind of middle-man and acted as a commission merchant in other matters, some of which probably took him to Spain. About 1692 he failed completely and took