Classicism - The spirit of Controversy (Louis Cazamian)

From The History of English Literature, by Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian (1937)

Classicism: Chapter III - The Spirit of Controversy

1. Critical Thought and Prose
The age of classicism broadens and intensifies the practice of free rational inquiry, which the Restoration was able, or wanted, to apply only in a rather incomplete way. The effort of critical thought is at the very heart of this age. Contemporary poetry finds therein its true inspiration; and as such inspiration is not in itself creative of any rhythmic expression, the art of writing in verse is led to set up for itself as an end the search of an adequate form, and expends its energy entirely in this search.

Outside the field of poetry, there stretches the vast domain in which polemical intelligence gives itself fuller scope. As one passes from the poets to the polemists of reason, one has the impression of remaining in the same literary and moral plane; from the first to the second, there is continuity and imperceptible change. With the latter, the care of the form is no longer paramount, or is no longer reinforced by the strict laws of regular measure. Thought concentrates on the discussion and solution of problems; art is a superadded need. But as the mind is delivered from former constraints, and broken to the practice of liberty; moreover, as it has created for two generations past a style adapted to the clear statement of ideas, the aesthetic quality is here no longer distinguishable from the justness and the force of the reasoning. The prose of the classical age has merits that are often superior, almost always solid, and the least of these merits is not that they have not been sought after; they spring from the limpidity, the finesse, the vigour with which the energy of intelligence makes itself felt.

Only with some writers of this time has prose a character of more conscious and refined art. They belong to the group in which purely rational inspiration is diversified with motives of another order. Addison carries the scruple of style very far. On the contrary, it is without desiring to be so, at least directly, that Swift is one of the great masters of English prose. His main object was to be a polemist. His supremely ironical work must be viewed in the atmosphere of the controversies where philosophy, religion, politics, and science wage unceasing war, carried away as they are by the inner enthusiasm of dogmatic or, more frequently, critical affirmation.

2. The Deistic Quarrel: Joseph Butler.

The opening years of the eighteenth century are astir with religious controversies. Reason growing bolder sets to work upon the obscure parts of religion, and wants to shed upon them the rays of a natural light. Such an enterprise appears destructive to the essential beliefs of Christianity, and apologists rise up in their defence. On either side, the arguments are of a similar order; they appeal to the sole authority of reason. After varying fortunes, the victory seems to rest with the champions of orthodoxy. But they have wounded themselves with the very weapons they employed; a long and bitter struggle leaves the public mind uncertain and weary, and inclining towards indifference or skepticism.

The men who submit to a purely human test the nucleus of revelation which the Reformation had preserved, prolong the line of critical thought which had been traced out by Protestantism in the sixteenth century. But in the seventeenth they have more direct predecessors. Lord Herbert of Cherbury had found in internal evidence the data which sufficed for a philosophical creed. At a later date, Locke demonstrated the 'reasonableness' of Christianity (1695), while Charles Blount (Anima Mundi, 1679) had given a systematic form of the thesis of a religion according to nature. The deep-seated need for rationality which is the characteristic feature of this age was to emphasize the latent conflict between revealed dogma and the demands of intellectual judgment; whilst the rivalries of sects, and their mutual persecutions, by weakening the prestige of the churches, drove the freest minds to inquire after a lay form of belief.

The Deists of the classical age, with some timidity at first, then with aggressive daring, carry these tendencies to the necessary conclusion. They are looked upon by their contemporaries, whose feelings they have shocked, as impious infidels. At the present day, the perspective of time enables us to understand them better. Theirs, on the whole, were temperaments keenly desirous of a truth that was rational, of sincerity, more than of a useful, passive conformity, or of humbleness. Their attempt to join up the domain of reason with that of faith points to the effort by which Locke had established their equivalence. If religion conforms entirely with good sense, they say, it cannot be in any way contrary to it; and so where religious tradition has some mystery to offer, some apparent absurdity, it is religious tradition that is at fault. Several of the capital tenets of Christianity are thus endangered; and the Establishment, the clergy and the hierarchy, become quite human and arbitrary institutions. It is no wonder, therefore, that Deism, despite the very positive character which it did not want to relinquish, should have been been denounced almost universally as a doctrine of negation pure and simple.

The series of its outstanding works opens with the Christianity Not Mysterious of Toland (1) (1696), which deduces from the idea itself of revelation the necessity for an intelligible belief, and makes no distinction between faith and clear cognition. A Catholic by birth, Toland evolves towards Protestant liberalism, then towards the Anglican Church, and finally towards and independent pantheism. The Discourse of Free Thinking of Collins (1713) draws from the principle of rational liberty, which the latitudinarian theologians had accepted without reserve, consequences which were destructive with regard to the authority of the clergy. The Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour by Woolston (1727) are animated by a spirit of ironic hostility against priests, the jealous custodians of tradition; he assails the official version of the miracles in the New Testament, where he believes that he can make out improbable or absurd elements, and concludes in favour of the wholly symbolical and spiritual character of the Sacred Book, which, he declares, should strengthen the prestige of a reasonable religion. The work of Tindal (Christianity as Old as the Creation, 1730) draws the general conclusions resulting from the application of reason alone to religious problems. He starts from the very formulae of contemporary theology, which affirmed the accord between faith by revelation and natural faith, and from it deduces the superfluousness of the first, or at least, submits it entirely to the control of the second. Finally, Peter Annet, in The Resurrection of Jesus examined by a Moral Philosopher (1744) concludes openly in favour of disbelief in one of the vital articles of traditional Christianity.

Such theses roused the ire of many, and called forth a great number of refutations. Denounced and condemned by the Church authorities, worried in some cases by the civil power, the Deists avoid for the most part the rigorous application of the law, by being prudent in their language; they most often declare that they are still Christians, and only desire to rid religion of the dross of unreason. But the significance of their writings does not escape the orthodox believers. Armed with a knowledge that is usually superior, and with equal intellectual sharpness, the champions of the Church find fault with the erudition, the character of the private life of their adversaries, just as much as with their dialectics. The Deistic controversy is remarkably violent.

Among all the apologists are to be singled out Clarke, Warburton, and Butler (2). The first, a man of supple and versatile mind, brings to the controversy his scientific knowledge, his acquaintance with philosophical questions, and a somewhat formal rigour of mind. He refutes Deism in the name of logic and metaphysics. His Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704) and his Discourse Concerning Natural Religion and the Christian Revelation (1705), leave a lasting trace upon English philosophy in the eighteenth century. Those souls which are perturbed by the negative tendencies of religious rationalism here find an orthodox conciliation of reason with faith. Clarke has notions methodically linked up together about the existence and the attributes of God, from the wisdom and goodness of the Creator he draws very clear conclusions as to the good and evil in human actions, and boldly intellectualizes ethics. His theory of the pre-established 'fitness' of things will stimulate the robust irony of Fielding.

Warburton is no less of a reasoner, and adds the telling keenness of an aggressive eloquence to the weight and force of arguments. A theologian, moralist, political writer, literary critic, and editor of Shakespeare, the future Bishop of Gloucester supplies the figure of the classical age with one of its significant traits. He raises the the passion for debate to its climax, in a century when the faculty of persuasion has unlimited confidence in itself. Less richly gifted and with less originality and humour, he is like a first sketch of Johnson. The friend and favourite disciple of Pope, he systematizes to excess the moral ideas of his master, and makes himself the spirited defender of the orthodoxy of the Essay on Man. His Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (1737-41) belabours at great length a thesis which for the needs of the cause at issue he treats as a strong point of his adversaries.

Anglican apologetics reach their culminating point with Joseph Butler (3). His effort has given to the whole century a feeling of philosophical security against the threats of criticism; he has awed doubt, and comforted faith; and in the estimation of his contemporaries, has finally conquered Deism. Nothing is more English than his Analogy. His method is severely intellectual, but inductive; in its general trend, it takes up again the favourite argument of the adversaries of revelation; it discovers in it an imperious invitation to go beyond the latter, and rise to the full belief of the Christian. The point of departure is thus the analysis of the data of human experience.

The life of man, when properly tested, reveals its own insufficiency; it necessarily implies a system of ends, logical but concealed from our understanding, where our earthly destiny is inserted between two mysteries, upon which revelation projects the only possible light. The mainspring of this reasoning lies in analogy, that is to say in the instinctive application to the whole order of the universe of a principle of continuity taught us by experimental reality; analogy governs our acts in virtue of the law which commands us to obey an enlightened view of our interest; it produces faith, according to this rule of the mind that an extremely strong probability is equivalent to a certitude. Thus this doctrine, which, at times, makes us think of Pascal, recalls rather the argument of the wager than the thesis of knowledge by way of the heart; utilitarian and relativist, it is already set in the direction in which the pragmatism of our times has developed.

Despite the ingenuity, the subtlety of which it gives proof, by showing that in the Christian dogma lies the necessary crowning of empirical wisdom, it owes its force to its realism. It has a grasp of the truth and actual conditions of human life, of the silent and scarcely conscious inductions by which are determined the tacit inferences of our thought. It analyses nature in a mood that wishes to be objective; it probes it, without showing it the secret complacency of the Deist; it perceives the character of things with a sober lucidity that inclines to pessimism. It has therefore exercised a deep and durable influence. But while it is relatively realistic for its century, it is no longer sufficiently so for ours. To-day, its postulates are immediately visible. The science of nature and that of man have come to be seen in a new light. To us the universe appears infinitely more complex than when Butler viewed it; and the lesson of a kind of implicit Christianity has ceased to emanate from it for those who are uninitiated; indeed it was not there, save on condition of having been first of all put there. Belief, just as incredulity, invokes other arguments to-day. Butler's system remains one of the most vigorous products of English thought in the eighteenth century; through its quiet anthropomorphism, its full confidence in reason, which empiricism limits but does not weaken, through the assurance with which it metes out its share to mystery and deciphers the plan of existence as if it were some familiar and simple text, it fitly represents a time when it seemed to be the extremity of modest caution to accept the view that the beyond was not completely intelligible.

3. Political Thought: Bolingbroke, Mandeville.

Bolingbroke (4) is in secret or avowed sympathy with Deism; he it is who furnished Pope with the outlines of the religious philosophy laid down in the Essay on Man, which did not fail to awaken much uneasiness on the side of orthodoxy. His posthumous essays reveal an attitude of intellectual irony with regard to the superstitions with which, he hints, primitive religion based upon nature had saddled itself through the centuries. Though this disrespect is aimed, for the post part, at paganism, or at Roman Catholic rites, yet a set purpose of free-thinking as to the historical elements of Christianity is ill disguised. But Bolingbroke is also a political writer, an historian, a moralist. His figure of a great nobleman, enlightened, scheming, sceptical, a patron of the arts, and concealing very keen personal disappointments beneath a mask of superior indifference, is very interesting. He played a foremost part in the literature and the life of the classical age.

His ethics and his philosophy have nothing original about them. His general views on the origins of the English constitution, or on the recent struggles waged in the name of the balance of Europe, have breadth and penetration, but belong to literature rather than to history. It is in the domain of politics that his thought has attempted a personal synthesis. Of a clear, alert, even a realistic mind, he understood that the weakness of the parliamentary system, more obvious every day with its success, would offer to a statesman the elements of a positive doctrine, capable of rallying round him all the forces of reaction, which by comparison would become forces of progress. To what extent was the opportunist Toryism thus constituted sincere? It seems that Bolingbroke threw his feelings into it, at the same time as he staked upon it his political fortune. He shows up in a very strong light the excesses of party rivalry, chases away like idle phantoms the antiquated jealousy of a royal absolutism from henceforth doomed; evokes the principles of the Revolution of 1688, and claims to apply them better than the corrupt administration openly practised by Walpole; urging all good citizens to be reconciled, he singles out the national idea as the means to unify wills no less than interests; and places at the head of a unanimous nation a prince who shares the feelings of his subjects, who has a deep sense of his duties, and is the living symbol of the fatherland.

This apology for a renewed and modernized monarchy, associated with the theme of patriotism, now becoming a distinct sentiment, and based on the moral forces of imagination and the emotions, was to be brilliantly successful in the nineteenth century. It is impossible not to perceive in Bolingbroke a kind of unconscious cynicism from the way he handles these psychological mainsprings of action. He is too clear a thinker, too clever in his ambition, to allow us to believe in a deep enthusiasm of feeling; and he is too desirous of speaking the language of impassioned conviction, to invest his argument with the pure virtue of direct simplicity. The eloquence with which he pleads his cause is animated, warm, but never soul-stirring, and wakens in the reader a secret uneasiness. But as a writer he has distinguished merits; his language, a trifle ornate, is full without losing in firmness, and has a natural rhythm, an easy, harmonious sense of balance, which secure a place for it among the brilliant examples of classical prose.

Mandeville (5) also applies a lucid analytic mind to the examination of the political and moral basis of society. But his inquiry burrows and dissects in quite another way. Conceived in the same spirit of rationalism, it sacrifices nothing to the eloquence of sentiment. It recalls Hobbes by the unrelentingly keen spirit of the research. Still more realistic than with the author of Leviathan, it does not superimpose a system of social metaphysics on the cold scrutiny of what exists.

The intention which animates these short treatises, as original as they are frankly cynical, is the wish to get at the forbidden or obscure truth of things; at that truth, hurtful to the preferences and sentimental habits of man as a social being, and against which manners, conventions, and psychological life itself, have erected countless barriers. The uncompromising rationalism of Mandeville is singularly in advance of the movement of modern thought, and in order to find its posterity, one has to come right down to the 'immoralist' thinkers and psycho-analysts of contemporary times. His thesis is that politics, with its deep inner dependences and hidden relations, links up moral behaviour with the success of states according to formulae quite different from those established or imposed by the official theory of conduct. This latter makes no distinction between the duty of the individual and that of a people, and affirms that for the former as for the latter prosperity is bound up with virtue. In fact, Mandeville declares, a nation is only rich and powerful through the vices and the corruption which are inextricably interwoven with its activities of every kind. London is the centre of a flourishing commerce, and the filthiness of its street is evidence of the fact. How can one hope to have them absolutely clean, without at the same time desiring that they should be less seething with trade? To unite austere virtues with the refinements of civilization, is a vain Utopia. In a republic of merchants, all compete to rob and cheat their neighbours more; the egoism of each will become the happiness of all, provided a wise government harmonizes and reconciles all these blind forces by limiting them one by another. Similarly, ethics are purely conventional. Each person, by nature, thinks only of himself. But society requires altruism; it produces it, cultivates it, by rewarding it with praises and honours, and men, vainglorious dupes, do through pride what their instinct urges them not to do.

Such is, at least, the active thought of Mandeville, and that which radiates imperiously from his work. On the surface, he respects moral observances; theoretical duty and absolute uncompromisingness, in accordance with official watchwords, retain their prestige; and the authority of principles is held up above all infringement. In fact, this apparent orthodoxy only heightens, by a kind of silent irony, the contrast endlessly suggested between the public reasons for and the real motives of human conduct.

Although thus veiled by transparent reserves, these analyses reveal a robust mind, firmly resolved to shake off the universal authority of fictitious values; rough, and rather indelicate, overstepping the correct limits, unmindful of fine shades; but sound, and animated by a scientific will. What would its conclusion be? Probably a clear-sighted wisdom, the outcome of moral modesty. It is directed against the austere professors of a puritanism which adapts itself very well, in reality, to deception in social life, and to cheating in business; it also has in view the idealistic and sentimental optimism of Shaftesbury. In the political order of things, it seems as it were an anticipatory outline, traced by an enfant terrible, of the system of the liberal economists. In the moral order, it is in intimate agreement with the corrosive intuitions of Swift. It appears in a sense to prelude the denunciations of Rousseau, to show up the inward rottenness of the industrial civilization which is in course of development; but while Mandeville actually places the happiness that is least imperfect in a poor, frugal, and limited society, he labours under no illusion as to the appeal of such an ideal, and does not propose seriously to return to the state of nature. Finally there are in his work the germs of a revolutionary criticism of the established order; he allows us to see the equalities, the injustice, the lies upon which this order rests. Here again, Mandeville is only a precursor, and his anarchism remains implicit. As a political theorist, he gives us a lesson of intellectual liberty, and throws new light upon the complexity of social facts; as a psychologist and moralist, he belongs, except in the matter of literary talent, to the line of Machiavelli and Nietzsche.


4. Erudition and Literary Criticism.

On that intellectual battlefield, the classical age, a war of learning and literary scholarship is also waged. Bentley (6) and Dennis dominate a numerous group of humanists and critics by the vigour of their faculty of arguing, not less than by their knowledge or their doctrine.

The quarrels of the scholars touch too closely upon the origins of faith, not to be interwoven with religious discussions; Bentley is an upholder of orthodoxy; he refutes atheism, and violently attacks the deist, Collins. But it is against other adversaries that he carries out his finest campaigns. To a minute knowledge of ancient texts, he joins an instinctive sense of method, a strong critical shrewdness, and above all the gift of divining the truth. Once he has formed his conclusions, he defends them with extraordinary force, in a style that is compact, cogent, and at the same time racy, capable of irony, concrete vigour, and eloquence. Though he claims—as one might expect—to be the most pacific of men, the joy of fighting, the intoxication of a victory foreseen, expected, and enjoyed, cast a glow over the five hundred pages of his Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris. There is something about Bentley that is better than the literary erudite, or the controversialist; he is already a modern savant. He explains literature and philology by means of linguistics: he makes, or opens the way for, many a discovery by turning to Greek dialects, metrics, and monuments. Nothing is wanting to this mind, save a certain detachment, the salutary liberation from oneself, the fine perception of superior artistic fitness. Thus we see his dogmatism and personal sentiment in the end crushing out his critical prudence; and his edition of Milton, strewn as it is with gratuitous corrections, is the strange error of an adventurous fancy.

In leaving the field of the old literatures, Bentley was quitting the solid ground, every corner of which he had explored. He stands as the greatest and last witness of the incomparable prestige of Graeco-Latin humanism. By a rather paradoxical fate, his part in the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns is not, superficially, what one might be led to expect. In demonstrating that the so-called Epistles of Phalaris are not authentic, he destroys an argument utilized by Sir William Temple to establish the superiority of the ancients (1690); and thus makes it possible for Swift to castigate, as having contemned them, the very man of his time who knew them best (The Battle of the Books).

In principle, Dennis (7) is for the ancients; Shakespeare, he holds, is inferior to them despite his great merits, because he violated the unities, of which they were the inventors. But a background of national temperament comes to light in Dennis; he places Milton, from certain points of view, above Virgil. Very self-willed, his mind has firmness, and his abusive violence knows how to sting. He makes an interesting effort to deepen the grounds of criticism, to analyse the philosophical elements of the beautiful. His objections to Pope's Essay on Criticism are often telling. While his attempt to explain the value of ancient poetry by its intimate fusion with religion is paradoxical, he already outlines, very clearly, the ethical theory of art, which is rooted in English instincts. He inveighs against Italian opera in the name of the dignity and seriousness of the stage, and assigns to the poet the duty of instructor and reformer. At the very heart of classicism, an ideal coloured with morality comes to free and define itself, opening up one of the avenues by which sentiment will steal into the stronghold.


5. The Criticism of Manners: Satire, Comedy, Memoirs.

The spirit of satire is present everywhere in the classical age; it forms by itself, or when allied with other elements, the inspiration of a great part of the poetry; the work of Pope is full of it. But outside of Pope, the formal satire in verse declines, and tends to become artificial; it will revive, however, under the influence of political motives, in the middle of the century. The satires of Young (The Universal Passion, 1725-1728) are very estimable declamations; those of the young Smollett (Advice, 1746; Reproof, 1747) will prove to be merely the exercises of a schoolboy. The rational criticism of manners is being diffused into manifold literary expressions, and the prose of comedy, of the novel, of letters and memoirs, as that of sermons and pamphlets, furnishes it with a more supple instrument.

Generally speaking, the theatre of the classical age does not belong to the central current of literature; it reveals rather the divergent or complementary aspects of the epoch; the comedy of Colley Cibber or Steele, the drama of Rowe, have their place in the study of middle-class inspiration, or of the dawn of sentimentalism. An exception must be made for the correct tragedy in which Addison, more mindful on this occasion of the rules than of his moralizing ideal, gave the most finished imitation of the French model (Cato, 1713). In fact, the influence of the French dramatists continues to be felt throughout the reign of Queen Anne; the adaptations of Racine and Corneille are numerous; and Ambrose Philip's Distrest Mother, 1712 (Andromaque), is only the most famous. However, the actual life of the dramatic art is to be found elsewhere.

Again it is not to be found in the expiring tradition of the Restoration. No doubt the licentiousness of the stage is not put to flight by the clarion call of Collier; indeed, it disappears only very gradually; the comedies of Mrs. Centlivre (8) show skill and movement, but vainly attempt to conceal an extremely crude frankness of tone beneath a final repentance of the wrongdoers. It is the change in society, in manners and in taste, that is shifting dramatic interest on to new subjects; and the old themes are visibly becoming exhausted.

If one had to look in the theatre for a brilliant comedy that voiced very well the tone of classical literature it would be The Beggar's Opera (9). The spirit of parody is the very soul of the play: it is the facile sentimentalism of many contemporary pieces that Gay's biting and ironical talent is here assailing. but the scope of the parody is wider; it is heightened by a political and moral satire, and even—in no very serious intention—by a kind of deliberate reversing of values, symbolized by the confusing of the planes for which art is accustomed, that recalls Mandeville and Swift.

Similarly, the memoirs of the time, a fertile literary kind, reveal the intensity of the group and party spirit, and of society life. The savour of scandal which Mrs. Manley knows how to give to her transparent fictions (New Atalantis, 1700), is fairly closely allied to the attraction which urges a Lord Hervey (10) to write. The dominant tone, in this latter work, is one of an almost universal severity; and one can scarcely avoid feeling in it the systematic bias of a malicious judgment.

There would be no artificiality in classing the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (11) with these works of so very diverse a nature, but of a psychologically similar inspiration. The tone of her moral personality harmonizes with that of temperaments which are intellectual, free, and critical. She is not exempt from some dryness, and even from a dash of cynicism. She is vivacious, witty, has an original gift of observation, a faculty for understanding the different exotic modes of life, and for painting them, a cultured taste, some pretension to philosophy, and with that a practical sense, and a great variety of interests. Despite the ease of her style, her correspondence, which she revised and which in every way is steeped in literary intentions, cannot be compared, as she hoped it would be, with that of Madame de Sévigné. She revealed the Turkish Orient to the general English public; and her friendships, her enmities, her famous quarrel with Pope, who was her admirer before he assailed her with biting irony, all give a rich documentary value to the story of her life.

The vein of satiric description, closely allied to that of parody, which runs at the very heart of the classical age, crops out again in a whole literature of burlesque, whose artistic and scholarly inspiration rejoins popular realism. Below The Dunciad of Pope, The Beggar's Opera of Gay, the Gulliver's Travels of Swift, and beside The Splendid Shilling of John Philips, one must not forget the Hudibras Redivivus of Ned Ward (1708), in short lines after the style of Butler, nor the Amusements Serious and Comical of Tom Brown (1700) (12). The eighteenth century opens, as the seventeenth had closed, with an exuberance of criticism and mockery, where libety of thought seems to be practised in a mood of self-satisfied display.





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(1) John Toland, 1669-1722; Anthony Collins, 1676-1729; Thomas Woolston, 1669-1731; Matthew Tindal, 1665-1733. For the deistic movement see Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, and J. M. Robertson, Short History of Free Thought, 1906.

(2) Samuel Clark, 1675-1729; William Warburton, 1698-1779.

(3) Joseph Butler, born in 1692, took orders, published in 1726 his Sermons which exposed his moral ideas and in 1736 The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, which quickly acquired the authority of a decisive demonstration. Bishop of Durham in 1750, he died in 1752. Works, ed. by Bernard, 1900.

(4) Henry Saint-John, born in 1678, of ancient family, was by birth destined for a public career; he shared with Harley the leadership of the Tory Government in 1710, and in 1712 was created Viscount Bolingbroke; the death of Queen Anne in 1714 interrupted his plans for a Jacobite restoration and caused him to flee to France where he was attached as secretary to the Pretender. Allowed to return to England in 1723, he was excluded from the Lords, and bitterly opposed the Whig minister, Walpole. After a further residence of seven years in France (1735-42) , he resigned himself to the complete failure of his political hopes, and died in 1751. His works were published by Mallet and comprise Letters on the Study and Use of History, 1736; A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism, 1736; The Idea of a Patriot King, 1738; and letters or treatises such as Remarks upon the History of England, and A Dissertation upon Parties, published in the Craftsman, the organ of the opposition to Walpole from 1727 to 1731. See Churton Collins, Bolingbroke, 1886; W. Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901-2; Hassall, Life of Bolingbroke, 1915; Butler, The Tory Tradition (Bolingbroke, Burke, Disraeli, Salisbury), 1914.

(5) Bernard Mandeville, a medical practitioner of Dutch origin, born in 1670, settled in London and published in 1705 a philosophical poem, The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest; republished in 1714, then in 1723, with notes, remarks, additions, etc., under the title The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. He also published Free Thoughts on Religion, 1720; The Origin of Humour, and The Usefulness of Christianity in War, 1732; and died in 17333. See the study by Sakmann, 1897; F. B. Kaye, edition of The Fable of the Bees, with introduction, notes, etc., 1924.

(6) Richard Bentley, born in 1662, in Yorkshire, studied at Cambridge, then was appointed tutor to the Stillingsfleet family, becoming a man of vast learning. After several years at Oxford, he became royal librarian in 1694, and in 1700 was elected to the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge. His long life, fully devoted to work and controversy, maps itself out according to his treatises, sermons, commentaries, editorial contributions, letters, replies, etc., particularly: Epistola ad Joannem Millium, 1691; A Confutation of Atheism, 1692-1713; A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, 1699; edition of Horace, 1711; Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-thinking (by Collins), 1713; Milton's Paradise Lost, a new edition, 1732. Works, ed. by A. Dyce, 1838. See Jebb, Bentley (English Men of Letters), 1902.

(7) John Dennis, 1657-1734, travelled in France and Italy, wrote for the stage, replied to Jeremy Collier, and led from 1700 onwards the life of a professional critic, in bitter conflict with most of the great writers of his time. He published The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, 1701; The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704; Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare, 1712, etc. See H. G. Paul, John Dennis, 1911; Lenz, John Dennis, 1913.

(8) 1680-1722; A Bold Stroke for a Wide, 1717.

(9) By Gay (1728). See above, Chap. II, sect. 7.

(10) 1696-1743; Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second, ed. by Croker, 1848. See also the Diary of Lady Cowper (1714-20), ed. by Spencer Cowper, 1864.

(11) Mary Pierrepont, born in 1689, had a studious youth, married in 1712 Edward Wortley Montagu, followed him to Constantinople, whither he was sent as ambassador (1717) and from there she revealed Turkey to her friends. Separated from her husband, she resided in Italy from 1743 to 1761, and began a correspondence with her daughter, Lady Bute, like Mme de Sévigné with Mme de Grignan; died in 1762, leaving a copious diary, destroyed by her daughter; society verses (satires, eclogues, etc.). Her Letters, which she herself revised or made up with the help of the diary, were published in 1763. Letters and Works, ed. by Moy Thomas, 1861; Everyman's Library, 1906. See Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times, 1907; I. Barry, Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 1928.

(12) Tom Brown's Amusements, and Ned Ward's London Spy have been re-edited by A. L. Hayward, 1927.

6. Universal Criticism: Arbuthnot, Swift.

—oOo—

Universal Criticism - Arbuthnot and Swift

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.

Swift

Charles Dickens

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

Charles John Huffham Dickens (1812-70), born in Portsmouth, the son of a clerk in the Navy pay office. He spent the happiest period of his boyhood in Chatham; this was followed by a period of intense misery which deeply affected him, during which his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea and he himself (aged 12) worked in a blacking warehouse. Memories of this painful period inspired much of his fiction, notably the early chapters of David Copperfield. He then worked as an office boy: studied shorthand, and became reporter of debates in the Commons for the Morning Chronicle. He contributed to the Monthly Magazine (1833-5), to the Evening Chronicle (1835), and to other periodicals the articles subsequently republished as Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People (1836-7); these attracted much attention and led to an approach from Chapman and Hall which resulted in the creation of Mr. Pickwick, and the publication in 20 monthly numbers (beginning April 1836) of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published in volume form in 1837, when Dickens was only 25 years old. After a slow start the series achieved immense popularity, and Dickens, with his young wife Catherine Hogarth, embarked on a promising future, courted by publishers, admired by the public, and befriended by celebrities. On Christmas Day 1836 he met John Forster, who became his close friend and biographer.

In 1837 (a year overshadowed by the death of his much-loved sister-in-law Mary) Oliver Twist began to appear in monthly numbers in Bentley's Miscellany, a new periodical of which Dickens was the first editor. It was followed by Nicholas Nickleby, also in monthly numbers. In 1840 a new weekly was launched, written wholly by Dickens, called Master Humphrey's Clock; it was originally intended to carry short sketches as well as instalments of the full-length novels The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1) and his long-deliberated Barnaby Rudge (1841), but the novels proved so popular that the linking by 'Master Humphrey' was dropped. In 1842 he and his wife visited America, where he was rapturously received. His first impressions were favourable, but disillusion followed and his American Notes (1842) caused much offence in America, as did his portrayal of American stereotypes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4). While in America he advocated international copyright and the abolition of slavery.

The sales of Martin Chuzzlewit were disappointing, but the demands of the public and his own growing family were met by the success of A Christmas Carol (1843), the first of a series of Christmas books (The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man), works described by him as 'a whimsical sort of masque intended to awaken loving and forebearing thoughts'. In 1844 he paid a long visit to Italy, which produced Pictures from Italy contributed to the Daily News, a new radical paper founded by Dickens in 1846 and briefly edited by him. He began Dombey and Son (1848) during a visit to Switzerland in 1846. In 1850 he started the weekly periodical Household Words, which he continued to edit until his death. In this he published much of his later writings, including the Christmas stories that replaced the Christmas books. David Copperfield appeared in monthly numbers in 1849-50; Bleak House in 1852-3; and A Child's History of England (a work which manifests his own historical bias: his heroes were Alfred and Cromwell) appeared irregularly in 1851-3. Hard Times appeared in 1854. Little Dorrit in 1855-7, A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, Great Expectations in 1860-1, and Our Mutual Friend in 1864-5.

During these years of intense productivity he also find time for his large family, for a vast circle of friends, aand for philantropic enterprises, at times combined with his passion for amateur theatricals; it was a fund-raising performance of Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep in 1857, in aid of Jerrold's family, that introduced him to the young actress Ellen Ternan. His admiration for her further strained his deteriorating relationship with his wife, and he and Catherine separated in 1858. He defied scandal, protested his own innocence (and that of his sister-in-law Georgina, for many years his devoted housekeeper, whose name gossip had also linked with his), and continued to appear in public, distracting himself from domestic sorrow by throwing his restless energy into public readings of his own works. These, though immensely successful, were physically and emotionally exhausting. He revisited America in 1867-8, delivered a series of readins there, and on his return continued to tour the provinces. He died suddenly in 1870, leaving unfinished his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Dickens captured the popular imagination as no other novelist had done and, despite some murmurs against his sensationalism and sentimentality and his inability to portray women other than as innocents or grotesques, he was also held in high critical esteem, admired by contemporaries as varied as Queen Victoria and Dostoevsky. But it was no until [the twentieth] century that he began to attract serious academic attention; see in particular G. Orwell, 'Charles Dickens'  in Inside the Whale (1940), H. House, The Dickens World (1941), and E. Wilson, 'Dickens: The Two Scrooges' (1941). Later criticism has tended to praise the complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the high-spirited humour and genius for caricature traditionally labelled 'Dickensian'. Mention should also be made of the series of distinguished illustrators inseparably connected with his work, which includes H. K. Browne ('Phiz'), Leech, Cruikshank, G. Cattermole, and S. L. Fildes; also of his collaboration with Wilkie Collins in various stories which appeared in Household Words.

J. Forster, The Life of Dickens (1872-4); Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952); G. H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel Criticism since 1836 (1955); P. A. W. Collins, Dickens and Crime (1962); P. Collins (ed.), Dickens: The Critical Heritage (1971). A collected edition of Dickens's c. 14,000 letters, instigated by Humphry House, was published under the general editorship of Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, vols. i-xi (1965-99), vol. xii (2001).

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Some works:


Pickwick Papers (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club), a novel by Dickens, first issued in 20 monthly parts Apr. 1836-Nov. 1837, and as a volume in 1837 (when Dickens was only 25 years old).

Mr Samuel Pickwick, general chairman of the Pickwick Club which he has founded, Messrs Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass, and Nathaniel Winkle, members of the club, are constituted a Corresponding Society of the Club to report to it their journeys and adventures, and observations of characters and manners. This is the basis on which the novel is constructed, and the Club serves to link a series of detached incidents and changing characters, without elaborate plot. The entertaining adventures with which Mr Pickwick and his associates meet are interspersed with incidental tales contributed by various characters. The principal elements in the story are: (1) the visit of Pickwick and his firends to Rochester and their falling in with the specious rascal Jingle, who gets Winkle involved in the prospect of a duel (fortunately averted). (2) The visit to Dingley Dell, the home of the hospitable Mr Wardle, the elopement of Jingle with Wardle's sister, their pursuit by Wardle and Pickwick, and the recovery of the lady; followed by the engagement of Sam Weller as Picwick's servant. (3) The visit to Eatanswill, where a parliamentary election is in progress, and Mr. Pickwick makes the acquaintance of Pott, editor of a political newspaper, and Mrs Leo Hunter. (4) The visit to Bury St Edmunds, where Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller are fooled by Jingle and his servant Job Trotter. (5) The pursuit of Jingle to Ipswich, where Mr Pickwick inadvertently enters the bedroom of a middle-aged lady at nigh; is in consequence involved in a quarrel with Mr Peter Magnus, her admirer; is brought before Mr Nupkins, the magistrate, on a charge of intending to fight a duel; and obtains his release on exposing the nefarious designs of Jingle on Nupkins's daughter. (6) The Christmas festivities at Dingley Dell. (7) The misapprehensions of Mrs. Bardell, Mr Pickwick's landlady, regarding her lodger's intentions, which lead to the famous action of Bardell v. Pickwick for breach of promise of marriage, in which judgement is given for the plaintiff, with damages £750. (8) The visit to Bath, in which Winkle figures prominently, firs in the adventure with the blustering Dowler, and secondly in hiis courtship of Arabella Allen. (9) The period of Mr Pickwick's imprisonment in the Fleet in consequence of his refusal to pay the damages and costs of his action; and the discovery by Jingle and Job Trotter in that prison, and their relief by Mr Pickwick. (10) The affairs of Tony Weller (Sam's father) and the second Mrs Weller, ending in the death of the latter and the discomfiture of the pious humbug and greedy drunkard Stiggins, deputy shepherd in the Ebenezer Temperance Association. (11) The affairs of Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen, medical students and subsequently struggling practitioners. The novel ends with the happy marriage of Emily Wardle and Augustus Snodgrass.



Nicholas Nickleby, a novel by Dickens, published 1838-9.

Nicholas, a generous, high-spirited lad of 19, his mother, and his gentle sister Kate are left penniless on the death of his father. They appeal for assistance to his uncle, Ralph Nickleby, a griping usurer, of whom Nicholas at once makes an enemy by his independent bearing. He is sent as usher to Dotheboys Hall, where Wackford Squeers starves and maltreats 40 urchins under pretence of education. His special cruelty is expended on Smike, a half-witted lad left on his hands and employed as a drudge. Nicholas, infuriated by what he witnesses, thrashes Squeers and escapes with Smike, who becomes his devoted friend. For a time he supports himself and Smike as an actor in the provincial company of Vincent Crummles; he then enters the service of the brothers Cheeryble, whose benevolence and good humour spread happiness around them. Meanwhile Kate, apprenticed to Madame Mantalini, dressmaker, is by her uncle's designs exposed to the gross insults of Sir Mulberry Hawk, one of his associates. From this persecution she is released by Nicholas, who breaks Sir Mulberry's head and makes a home for his mother and sister. Nicholas himself falls in love with Madeline Bray, the support of a selfish father and the object of a conspiracy of Ralph Nickleby and another reovolting old usurer, Gride, to marry her to the latter. Ralph, whose hatred for Nicholas has been intensified by the failure of his plans, knowing Nicholas's affection for Smike, conspires to remove the latter from him; his plots are thwarted with the help of Newman Noggs, his eccentric clerk, but nevertheless Smike falls a victim to consumption, and eventually dies in the arms of Nicholas. Copnfronted with ruin and exposure, and finally shattered by the discovery that Smike was his own son, Ralph hangs himself. Nicholas, befriended by the Cheerybles, marries Madeline, and Kate marries the Cheeryble's nephew Frank. Squeers is transported, and Gride is murdered.



Barnaby Rudge, a novel by Dickens published in 1841 as part of Master Humphrey's Clock. The earlier of Dickens's two historical novels, it is set at the period of the Gordon anti-popery riots of 1780, and Lord George Gordon himself appears as a character. Like the later A Tale of Two Cities, it contains powerful evocations of mob violence, culminating in the sack of Newgate. Dickens wrote, 'my object has been to convey an idea of multitudes, violence and fury; and even to lose my own dramatis personae in the throng'.

Reuben Haredale, a country gentleman, has been murdered, and the murderer is never discovered. His brother Geoffrey Haredale, a Roman Catholic, and the smoothe villain Sir John Chester (who models himself on Lord Chesterfield) are enemies; Chester's son Edward is in love with  Haredale's niece Emma, and the elders combine, despite their hatred, to thwart the match. The Gordon riots, secretly fomented by Chester, supervene. Haredale's house is burned and Emma carried off. Edward saves the lives of Haredale and Emma and wins Haredale's consent to his marriage with the latter. Haredale discovers the murderer of his brother, the steward Rudge, father of the half-witted Barnaby and the blackmailer of Barnaby's devoted mother Mrs Rudge. Rudge is hanged, Barnaby (who had been swept along as unwitting participant in the riots) is reprieved from the gallows at the last moment, and Chester is killed by Haredale in a duel.

The vivid description of the riots forms the principal interest of the book, which also displays Dickens's concern with the demoralizing effect of caputal punishemnt in the character of Dennis the Hangman aand Hugh, the savage hostler who turns out to be Chester's son. Other characters involved in the plot include the upright locksmith Gabriel Varden, with his peevish wife and their coquettish daughter Dolly; Simon Tappertit, his aspiring and anarchic apprentice, and Miggs, his mean and treacherous servant; John Willett, host of the Maypole Inn, and Joe, his gallant sons, who finally wins Dolly; and Grip, Barnaby's raven.







Martin Chuzzlewit, The Life and Adventures of, a novel by Dickens, published 1843-4.

Martin, the hero, is the grandson of old Martin Chuzzlewit, a wealthy gentleman made misanthropical by the greed of his family. The old man has reared Mary Graham, a young orphan to look after him, and regards her as his daughter. Young Martin is in love with Mary, but the grandfather, mistrusting his selfish character, repudiates him and gets him dismissed from his position as pupil to his cousin Mr. Pecksniff, architect and arch-hypocrite. Martin, accompanied by the indomitably cheerful Mark Tapley as his servant, sails for America to seek his fortune. He goes as an architect to the faudulent Eden Land Corporation, where he loses his money and nearly dies of fever. (This part gave great offence in the USA). He then returns to England, his experiences having reformed his selfish attitudes. His grandfather has meanwhile established himself and Mary in Pecksniff's household and pretended to place himself under his direction, thus satisfying himself of Pecksniff's meanness and treachery. (Pecksniff tries to inveigle and bully Mary into marrying him). He exposes the hypocrite, restores his grandson to favour, and gives him Mary's hand.

A sub-plot concerns Jonas Chuzzlewit, the son of old Martin's brother, a character of almost incredible villainy. Her murders his father (in intention if not in fact), marries Mercy Pecksniff and treats her with the utmost brutality; murders the director of a bogus insurance company, by whom he has been taken in and blackmailed; is detected; and finally poisons himself.

The book contains many memorable minor characters: Tom Pinch, Pecksniff's gentle loyal assistant, and his sister Ruth; Pecksniff's daughters Charity and Mercy (Cherry and Merry); and Mrs Gamp, the disreputable old nurse; while 'Todgers's' is an eccentric London boarding house.





David Copperfield, a novel by Dickens, published 1849-50. 'Of all my books', wrote Dickens, 'I like this the best', and it has always been a favorite with a wide public. It is (in some of its details) Dickens's veiled autobiography.

David Copperfield is born at Blunderstone (of which the original is the village of Blundeston) in Suffolk, soon after the death of his father. His mother, a gentle, weak woman, marries again, and her second husband Mr Murdstone, by cruelty disguised as firmness and abetted by Miss Murdstone his sister, drives her to an early grave. Young Copperfield, who has proved recalcitrant, is sent to schoool, where he is bullied by the tyrannical headmaster Creakle, but makes two friends in the brilliant and fascinating Steerforth and the good-humoured plodding Traddles. Thence he is sent to menial employment in London, where he lives a life of poverty and misery, enlivened by his acquaintance with the mercurial and impecunious Mr Micawber and his family. He runs away and walks penniless to Dover to throw himself on the mercy of his aunt Betsey Trotwood, an eccentric old lady who had renounced all interest in him from his birth because, contrary to her firm expectation, he had been born a boy instead of a girl. He is kindly received and given a new home, which he shares with an amiable lunatic, Mr Dick. This poor gentleman is perpetually engaged on a memorial regarding his own affairs, but is unable to complete it owing to the inevitable intrusion into it of King Charles's head. Copperfield continues his education at Canterbury, living in the house of Miss Trotwood's lawyer Mr. Wickfield, whose daughter Agnes, a girl of exceptionally sweet and high-minded disposition, exercises a powerful influence on the rest of his life. He then enters Doctors' Commons, being articled to Mr Spenlow, of the firm of Spenlow and Jorkins. Meanwhile he has come again into touch with Steerforth, whom, ignorant of his true character, he introduces to the family of his old nurse Clara Peggotty, married to Barkis the carrier. The family consists of Mr Peggotty, a Yarmouth fisherman, his nephew Ham, and the latter's cousin Little Em'ly, a pretty, simple girl whom Ham is about to marry. The remaining inmate of Mr Peggotty's hospitable home is Mrs Gummidge, another dependant and a widow whose peevish laments for her forlorn condition are patiently borne by Mr Peggotty. Steerforth induces Em'ly to run away with himl, thereby producing intense misery in the Peggotty household. Mr Peggotty sets out to find her, following her through many countries, and finally recovering her after she has been cast off by Steerforth. The latter's crime also brings unhappiness to his mother and to her protégée Rosa Dartle, who has long loved Steerforth with all the suppressed violence of a passionate nature. The tragedy finds its culmination in the shipwreck and drowning of Steerforth, and the death of Ham in trying to save him.

Meanwhile Coppefield, blind to the affection of Agnes Wickfield, marries Dora Spenlow, a pretty empty-headed child, and becomes famous as an author. Dora dies after a few weeks of married life and Copperfield, at first disconsolate, awakens to a growing appreciation and love of Agnes. Her father has fallen into the toils of a villanous and cunning clerk, Uriah Heep, who under the cloak of fawning humility has obtained complete control over him, reduced hism to the verge of imbecility, and nearly ruined him. Uriah also aspires to marry Agnes. But his misdeeds, which include forgery and theft, are exposed by Micawber, employed as his clerk, with the assitance of Traddles, now a barrister. Uriah is last seen in prison, under a life sentence. Coppefield marries Agnes. Mr Peggotty, with Em'ly and Mrs. Gummidge, is found prospering in Australia, where Mr Micawber, relieved of his debts, appears finally as a much-esteemed colonial magistrate.



Bleak House, a novel by Dickens, published in monthly parts 1852-3.

The book contains a vigorous satire on the abuses of the old court of Chancery, the delays and costs of which brought misery and ruin on its suitors. The tale centres in the fortunes of an uninteresting couple, Richard Carstone, a futile youth, and his amiable cousin Ada Clare. They are wards of the court in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, concerned with the distribution of an estate, which has gone on so long as to become a subject of heartless joking as well as a source of great profit to those professionally engaged in it. The wards are taken to live with their kind elderly relative John Jarndyce. They fall in love and secretly marry. The weak Richard, incapable of sticking to any profession and lured by the will-o'-the wisp of the fortune that is to be his when the case is settled, sinks gradually to ruin and death, and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes suddenly to an end on the discovery that the costs have absorbed the whole estate in dispute.

When Ada goes to live with John Jarndyce she is accompanied by Esther Summerson, a supposed orphan, one of Dickens's saints, and the narrative is partly supposed to be from her pen.

Sir Leicester Dedlock, a pompous old baronet, is devotedly attached to his beautiful wife. Lady Dedlock hides a dreadful secret under her haughty and indifferent exterior. Before her marriage she has loved a certain Captain Hawdon and has become the mother of a daughter, whom she believes dead. Hawdon is supposed to have perished at sea. IN fact the daughter lives in the person of Esther Summerson, and Hawdon in that of a penniless scrivener. The accidental sight of his handwriting in a legal document reveals to Lady Dedlock the fact of his existence, and its effect on her alerts the cunning old lawyer Tulkinghorn to the existence of a mystery.  Lady Dedlock's enquiries bring her, through the medium of a wretched crossing-sweeper, Jo, to the burial ground where her former lover's miserable career has just ended. Jo's unguarded reveleation of his singular experience with this veiled lady sets Tulkinghorn on the track, until he possesses all the facts and tells Lady Dedlock that he is going to expose her next day to her husband. That night Tulkinghorn is murdered. Bucket, the detective, presently reveals to the baronet what Tulkinghorn had discovered, and arrests a former French maid of Lady Dedlock, a violent woman, who has committed the murder. Lady Dedlock, learning that her husband knows her secret, flies from the house in despair, and is found dead near the grave of her lover, in spite of the efforts of her husband and Esther to save her.

Much of the story is preoccupied with Esther's devotion to John Jarndyce, her acceptance of his offer of marriage from a sense of duty and gratitude, though she loves a young doctor, Woodcourt; Jarndyce's discovery of the state of her heart, and his surrender of her to Woodcourt.

There are a host of interesting minor characters, among whom may be mentioned Harold Skimpole (drawn 'in the light externals of character' from Leigh Hunt), who disguises his utter selfishness under an assumption of childish irresponsibility; Mrs Jellyby, who sacrifices her family to her selfish addiction to professional philanthropy; Jo, the crossing-sweeper, who is chivied by the police to his death; Chadband, the pious, eloquent humbug; Turveydrop, the model of deportment; Krook, the 'chancellor' of the rag and bone department, who dies of spontaneous combustion; Guppy, the lawyer's clerk, Guster, the poor slavey; the low stationer Snagsby; Miss Flite, the little lunatic lady who haunts the Chancery courts; and Jarndyce's friend, the irascible and generous Boythorn (drawn from W. S. Landor).

For many of Dickens's contemporaries, this novel marked a decline in his reputation; individual characters (notably Jo and Bucket) were praised but it was charged with verbosity and 'absolute want of construction'. Later readers, including G. B. Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad and Trilling, have seen it as one of the high points of his achievement, and the herald of his last great phase.



Great Expectations, a novel by Dickens, which first appeared in All the Year Round 1860-1, published in book form in the latter year.

It recounts the development of the character of the narrator, Philip Pirrip, commonly known as 'Pip', a village boy brought up by his termagant sister, the wife of the gentle, humorous, kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery. He is introduced to the house of Miss Havisham, a lady half-crazed by the desertion of her lover on her bridal night, who, in a spirit of revenge, has brought up the girl Estella to use her beauty as a means of torturing men. Pip falls in love with Estella, and aspires to become a gentleman. Money and expectations of more wealth come to him from a mysterious source, which he believes to be Miss Havisham. He goes to London, and in his new mode of live meanly abandons the devoted Joe Gargery, a humble connection of whom he is now ashamed. Misfortunes come upon him. His benefactor proves to be an escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, whom he, as a boy, had helped; his great expectations fade away nad he is peniless. Estella marries his sulky enemy Bentley Drummle, by whom she is cruelly ill-treated. Taught by adversity, Pip returns to Joe Gargery and honest labour, and is finally reunited to Estella who has also learnt her lesson. Other notable characters in the book are Joe's uncle, the impudent old impostor Pumblechook, Jaggers, the skilful Old Bailey lawyer, and his good-hearted clerk Wemmick; and Pip's friend in London, Herbert Pocket.

It appears from Forster's life of Dickens that the author originally devised a less happy ending to the story, which he altered in deference to the advice of Bulwer-Lytton.






Our Mutual Friend, a novel by Dickens, published in monthly parts between May 1864 and Nov. 1865.

John Harmon returns from the exile to which he has been sent by a harsh father, a rich dust-contractor; he expects to receive the inheritance to which his father has attached the condition that he shall marry a certain girl, Bella Wilfer. Bella is unknown to him, and he confides to a mate of the ship which is bringing him home his intention of concealing his identity until he has formed some judgement of his allotted wife. The mate lures him to a riverside haunt, attempts to murder him, throws his body into the river, and is in his turn murdered and his body likewise thrown into the river. Harmon revocers and escapes, the mate's body is found after some days, and, owing to Harmon's papers found upon it, it is taken to be that of Harmon. Harmon's intention of remaining unknown is thus facilitated; he assumes the name of John Rokesmith and becomes the secretary of the kindly, disinterested Mr Boffin, old Harmon's foreman, who, in default of young Harmon, inherits the property. He is thrown into close contact with Bella, a flighty minx, who is adopted by Boffin and who is turned by her first taste of wealth into an arrogant, mercenary jade. Rokesmith nevertheless falls in love with her and is contemptuously rejected. Harmon's identity is now discovered by the amiable Mrs Boffin, and the Boffins, devoted to their old master's son and convinced of Bella's soundness of heart, contrive a plot to prove her. Boffin pretends to be transformed by his wealth into a hard and griping miser, and heaps indignities on Harmon, who is finally dismissed with contumely. Bella, awakened to the evils of wealth and to the merits of Rokesmith, flies from the Boffins and marries her suitor. His identity presently comes to light, and with his assistance the scheme of a one-legged old villain, Silas Wegg, to blackmail Boffin is exposed.

Concurrently with this main theme runs the story of the love of Eugene Wrayburn, a careless, insolent young barrister, for Lizzie Hexam, daughter of a disreputable boatman. His rival for her affections, Bradley Headstone, a schoolmaster, attempts to murder Wrayburn. The latter is saved by Lizzie and marries her. Among the notable characters in the book are the Veneerings, types of social parvenus; the good Jew Riah; the blackmailing waterside villain Rogue Riderhood; Jenny Wren, the dolls' dressmaker; Bella Wilfer's grotesque father, mother, and sister; and the spirited Betty Higden, an old woman with a haunting dread of the workhouse.

Many early reviewers agreed with H. James, who found the novel 'forced' and 'wanting in inspiration', but later critics (including Humphry House and E. Wilson) have praised it highly, stressing in particular the complex use of the dirt-money symbolism.

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From Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature ("The Idealistic Reaction"):

Dickens and the social novel.—

(a). DICKENS. There is not any injustice to Dickens (1) in going straight to the central feeling which gives life to his work; and that feeling is social. Thorough it he is linked with a whole group of writers, and has a place in a great movement of the time.

No novelist before Dickens had treated the lower middle classes on such broad lines or in so frank a way. He studies them not as a detached, superior kind of observer, but as one of their own level; a symphathy, an immediate community of impressions, and, as it were, an instinctive fraternity, thus impregnate his study. Be the tone that of pathos or of humour, the mediocre lives on which he focuses his and our attention come, as if naturally, to acquire the dignity of art. Such is the permanent foundation of his realism. But below it, in the inner realms of consciousness, we feel the quivering image, the anguish of soul-debasing poverty. The unforgettable experince of his early youth—that humiliating phase of his life—becomes thus one of the decisive elements in the formation of his personality. Even when those hardships had been left behind, Dickens could never forget them. It was this dim memory, at the secret core of his very life-success, that continued to sustain the energy of his effort to secure his material independence at all risks. It helped to intensify as well the multiple suggestions of active charity which made Dickens an apostle, and turned his work into a gospel of humanitarianism.

Considered from this point of view, Dickens has his place in the idealistic reaction [to 19th-century industrial capitalism]. His influence combined itself with that of Carlyle, whose authority as a teacher he accepted or felt. But his most important significance is not that he shared in the philantropical crusade, that he showed up abuses, or prepared those fits of moral compunction from which reforms have sprung. Despite the practical benefits which did accrue from such a task, it cannot be said that Dickens was always happily inspired in this direction (2); indeed his art suffered from the bitter or strained mood which usually goes with a thesis of denunciation. Above all, he has stimulated the national sensibility which was slowly wasting away in the dry atmosphere of a utilitarian age; he has re-established balance and a more wholesome order in the proportionate values of the motives of life. This psychological action is brought to its most precise and most effectual pitch in his impassioned attack on the frame of mind which supports the individualistic theory of the economists. And here the criticism of the novelist succeeds in shaking the moral foundations of a doctrine. Dickens has contributed to the salutary weakening of dogmatic egoism. On this point, his teaching comes into line with that of Carlyle and Ruskin; he takes up his stand with the prophets of sentiment against the harder advocates of rationalism. In other respects, his temperament holds him aloof from their mystic exaltation. He retains a firm hold on reality; and never loses the sense of the average conditions which all useful activities must fulfil. An ardent believer in progress, moderate in his views, and of an optimistic turn of mind, he lives and thinks in complete accord with the middle-class opinions of his day.

And this middle class for Dickens is that of London, of the ancient cities, and the agricultural districts of the south. He knows nothing about the feverish existence of the working classes in the midlands and in the north, or if he does, his knowledge is very imperfect. The problems he touches upon in the course of his novels do not concern the industrial crowds which had recently developed, but rather a class of long standing, with settled and traditional characteristics. Instead of bringing us into direct contact with the epoch of machinery, and the new world, he leads us back towards the past. While his intentions are anything but reactionary, his instictive preferences tend in this direction. The customs and habits he describes most readily savour somewhat of the archaic; only rarely does he venture beyond the field of observation which he had viewed in his youth. The joviality, the cordiality he depicts or teaches are those of a society that is still patriarchal, and that has been just perceptibly altered, but not invaded and upset by modern life. Railways will never be anything else than a sensational wonder for Dickens; it is by the jingling of the stage-coach harness that his imagination is wakened into spontaneous play.

Just as the background in his novels dates from 1825 or 1830, and underneath the symptoms of a changing age tends to link up with the eighteenth century, so his inner nature, attuned to the spirit of an animated, picturesque, and familiar life, finds itself in harmony with a fairly average and a permanent type of the English temperament. Dickens appealed to the very heart of England, and she recognized herself in his pages because he offered her a picture of herself which she loved to seee; he showed her an England at her best. In a nation of very mixed tendencies—like every other nation in this respect—he singles out the features of genial humanity and organizes them into a whole; the author himself assumes, and often gives to his characters, an expression of sympathy, the smile of humour, and the cheeriness of a kind heart. This composite portrait, in which not only Mr. Pickwick but many others have their shares, has the value of a synthetic image; the moral preferences of Dickens enter into every one of its lineaments. These preferences comprise, with a warm expansiveness of heart, a liking for the peculiarities of character, and almost a taste for eccentric oddities; a realism both psychological and descriptive, without system or rigour, which springs from a lively sense of buoyant curiosity, full of an instinctive trust of life. Thus it was that the very great success of Dickens's work had the efficacy of a deep influence; that his novels told in favour of solidarity, against the egoistic spirit of the age; and that his popularity, which waned for a time after his death, has now again come into its own, and no limit can be set to its duration.

Dickens wrote rapidly. His strenuous energy was not always a substitute for careful art. His faults in taste and in style, the failings of his intuitive verve, are obvious; his literary individuality lacks polish. He sacrifices balance for the sake of intense effects; his expression obeys monotonous habits; he repeats himself to excess. His pathos is cheap or exaggerated; his imagination in its continual effort to emphasizee the character of things tends rather to distort them; his vision, fond of agitated outlines, is apt to lose the very sense of repose. There is working, at the very core of his genius, a persistent spirit of Romanticism, which subordinates the actual truth, like the soberness, of every feature to emotional or picturesque values; his realism is stirred by a feverish force of hallucination. And throughout the whole of his work the effusion and the expression of self disturb or contradict the relative objectivity, without which there could be no novel of real life. At every turn in his stories we come upon the favourable or unfavourable opinions of the author—a kind of sentimental commentary on his own work; and these instances of bias, intensified by polemical preferences and arguments, too often bore or annoy the reader.

 

These blemishes, which the contemporaries of Dickens found easy to tolerate, while the succeeding generation censured them severely, are to-day seen in a more mellow perspective as connected with the sovereign gifts of an inspired artist. As a creator, Dickens is prodigious. The picture he has painted of the social world is one of the richest in the range of literature. His perception of things and of character is remarkable for its direct keenness and fresh vigour while not unlimited in scope, it is, nevertheless, very wide; coloured as it is by the writer's personality, it possesses the quality of an incomparable liveliness. There is nothing scientific about it, nor does it seek to be so. It takes from reality only what interests it; and as the need which it obeys are those of emotion and humour, the real is organized into a show of varied interest, always intense in effect, and of a tone either dramatic of facetious. Into this world no one can penetrate unless he has bowed to the artist's will; but such is the power of his charm that our critical faculty is disarmed. Few are the readers wholly proof against the spell.

At the first glance our eye is caught by the swarming host of human figures. Over the vast fresco of his work, Dickens has thrown them in plenty; they give to every part the pulsation of life itself. Still, their quality is far from equal. The writer has not created them thorugh one and the same intuition of their original beings; he has not felt them all grow upon him with one and the same imperiousness. Their features may have been suggested from the outside by a caprice of the imagination, by a preconceived feeling, or by the demands of the plot; they may represent superficial or deductive intentions; instead of being nourished from the deeper personality of the novelist, they may be, as it were, engrafted upon more exterior eleemnts—mere desires for antithesis or effect. Then it is that, being less directly connected with the very substance of their maker, they they more colosely resemble one or other of his feature, and less closely resemble life. They bear the stamp of his caprice, of a bent in his mind, of some partiality in his outlook; and being devoid of any lineaments proper to themselves which might have played the part of an addition or a corrective, they are nothing but that impoverished expression of their creator's personality. There is in the work of Dickens a whole range of artificial creatures, arbitrarily drawn by his somewhat crude dramatic sense, by his hasty aversions, by his taste for drollery which often approaches caricature. And so it happens that his personages have no other interest but what they may owe to satire, melodrama, or farce.

But into the satire, pathos, or farce many of his heroes infuse the superior virtue of an irresistible vitality. These bear a no less recognizable imprint of their origin; a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Jingle, a Micawber, a Peggotty, a Dick Swiveller, a marchioness, quite as much as a David Copperfield, are members of one family, whose common rather is easily divined; they all have something of his readily compassionate humanity, and some gleam of his humour. Nevertheless, they are themselves, and develop according to their own principles. So extreme is their diversity that they exemplify in every respect the essential individuality of human beings. But they all have an irrefutability, a witchcraft to them; no one thinks of discurssing them; they come forth, and we accept them; they possess the solidity, the volume of three-dimensional figures; the personality which supports them has transferrred itself entirely into them, has shaped them out according to the mysterious instinct of all its powers. This creative process, identical with that which one can find in the masterpieces of the stage, is carried thorugh with admirable abundance and variety. Yet here again we find many grades. The best of the personages are not usually those whom Dickens has studied most deliberately and consciously. it is not often that his traitors, heroes, or heroines have quite as much flavour, as much vivaciousness or irresistible truth, as the less prominent characters which he has dashed off with a freer hand. In the episodical parts of his work his spontaenous verve very often joins an unforgettable vigour to the literal accuracy of the outlines. And it is here, perhaps, that his masterly skill is seen at its best.

What is true of the characters is also true of the action. The most elaborately worked-out plots, in Dickens, are not the most satisfactory. Where the thesis is stressed, as in the historical and in the purely social novels (Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times), we feel that too rigid an intention is at work; and that effort towards a concentration on a single purpose makes the whole book somwhat strained. Dickens does not possess the gift of compact logical or artistic writing. The type of anrrative which best suits his inventive genius savours very much of the old picaresque model; his favourite theme is that of life, a life which lasts, which renews itself, and which is born, as it were, of itself. In the opening chapters of Pickwick the connecting thread is of the most slender; later it gains strength, without allowing the reader to forget the purely comic purpose with which the work began; and a plot revolving round the biography of a central character (as in Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield) imparts a supple unity to the best novels. In his later work Dickens endeavoured to brace up this rather lax construction; Great Expectations is a novel of a strong and sober texture, which taes a place apart from all the rest.

The profusion of his scenic settings answers to the abundance of his personages. The backgrounds are painted with an ample brush, and the lavishness of details breathers a kind of exhilaration. Description, with Dickens, is more than a means; very often it is an end in itslef. It contributes to the general effect, but with such varied and powerful resources at its command that it subordinates the other elements of the narrative to itself. Thus the novel tends to become all evocative and imagination, the instrument of realism, carries the search for intense truth right to the domain of purely lyrical vision. The writer's senses are quick and keen; nature, the aspects of concrete life, the picturesqueness of things, eagerly absorbed, are transferred to his work in facile patches, not so much highly coloured as vibrating, astir with a nervous quiver of each contour. The material universe appears as made up of broken lines, pronounced gestures, and rapid motions. Supremely suggestive, this art has its limitation in a certain instability, a kind of flickering exaggeration. The rhythm in the succession of images, with Dickens, often shows some slight morbidness.

In his calmer and less feverish spells of work, this gift of infusing with life all that appeals to the senses has the happiest results. He calls up before our eyes scene after scene of a truth made striking, and which yet our feeling of normal life is willing to accept: so accurately is the individual character of things thrown into relief, and so much realistic flavour is mixed up with the lecquence, the moving poetry, or the fanciful drollery, which are the main objevct and indeed the soul of the picture.

The reason is that the language which has to express both those emotions and those images is naturally rife with them. Dickens is a great writer by virtue of the spontaneity of his verve, and this with a minimum of art. His vocabulary has superabundant wealth; it wells up naturally and easily; all the inherent genius of the English race for concrete perception goes to nourish it. It carries with it, and turns to use, the contents of other veins of speech—learned words, technical terms; but the main inexhaustible stream is drawn from the fund of a racy, national, in no way particularized experience. The refining process of culture is less perceptible here than in the works of many other writers. Dickens, like Carlyle, has his touches of vulgarity—hardly perceptible, at once forgotten under the spell of his delicately generous heart. The highest quality of his style is its movement: a movement which is at times strained and difficult to follow, but, in its uninterrupted onward flow, carries on the narration or dialogue without any fear of stagnating inertia. In certain respects the conversations in Dickens's novels are unequalled; the most familiar tones, those of arteless comedy or of expressive self-revelation, have in the mouths of his characters a frankness, and appropriateness reaching to perfection. On the other hand, when the situation tends to be artificial, and the verve less spontaneous, an unreal note is immediately perceptible in the dialogue. For the latter has no value in itself; Dickens does not seek to be objective by sistem and rule; those among his personages who are replete with life have a voice of their own, just as they have an individual physiognomy; the others speak in a somewhat artificial tone, which sounds like a thinly veiled echo of the author's own voice.

No analysis can grasp the essential originality of such a work; its power of persuasion, which sweeps away our reserves, makes us forgive all the faults of too insistent a method, of a sentimental search for pathos, of an excessive striving after comic effects. Each of these weaknesses is compensated by merits of greater importance. Everything considered, it is due to his talent of sympathy, to his sense of the pitiful tragedy of daily life, and to a rich vein of inventive comedy, that Dickens redeems all his blemishes, and keeps his place in the front rank. The Christmas Carol is a pretty good example both of his faults and of his charm; few have read it without feeling at times annoyed, and much more often won over to the writer's will.

This art has a deep human quality. As its chief instruments are tears and laughter, and above all the poignancy and flavour of their fusion, Dickens is a prominent figure in the lineage of humorists. His humour, that is to say, the temperament of his reaction to the alternate aspects of life, is rich because it is formed of intense elements, his sensibility being keenly alive to the moving significance as well as to the odd nature of things. But this alone would not constitute humour, if it did not contain a principle of self-control, the faculty to dominate and to mix, according to the preferences of an intuitive art, the succesive compelementary impulses of his being. As a humorist, Dickens is amenable to discipline, to a psychological duality, one side of his mind watching the other. It is due to the presence of this salutary element that his art, threatened in other respects with a too definite Romanticism, acquires restraint, dignity, and the complexity of manifold planes, which, otherwise, it might have lacked.

Among the English novelists, Dickens is neither the most consummate artist, nor the finest psychologist, nor the most accomplished realist, nor the most seductive of tale writers; but he is probably the most national, the most typical, and the greatest of them all.

In his own sphere there is none in his time who can approach him. The novel of social inspiration, however, attracts the talents of original writers: from 1840 to 1850 this kind engrosses most of the vitality of English fiction.

(b). Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley, the Brontës.—  (...).

Notes

(1). Charles Dickens, born at Portsmouth in 1812, the son of a small naval functionary, spent his early years in Kent and received an incomplete education; in London, where his father had been imprisoned for debts, he was employed in a blacking warehouse. After this period of struggle he passed some time in a private school, and went into a solicitor's office, then worked for various newspapers in the capacity of Parliamentary reporter or provincial correspondent. In 1833 he began his pen pictures of life with Sketches by Boz (published in volume form, 1836). The demand of a publisher for the text of a humorous collection of stories, to which illustrations were to be supplied, resulted in the series of The Pickwick Papers (published 1836-7). Their success was tremendous and placed him in the front rank of writers. He then published in monthly instalments Oliver Twist (1837-8), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge (1840-41). A voyage to the United States supplied him with American Notes (1842), and also inspired his Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4). In 1843-8 appeared the Christmas Books (A Christmas Carol, etc.); then Dombey and Son (1847-8). David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-3), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857-8), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-1), Our Mutual Friend (1864). He died in June 1870, leaving the incomplete novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). He had given many public readings in England and in America (1858-68); edited periodicals (Household Words, All the Year Round); written for the stage; published Pictures from Italy (146), A Child's History of England (1852-4), etc. Works, Gadshill ed., 1897, etc.; Bibliographical ed., 1902; Imperial ed., 2903, etc. Letters, 3 vols., 1880-1. See the critical biographies by Forster (1872-4); Ward (English Men of Letters), 1882; Marzials (Great Writers), 1887; P. Fitzgerald, 1905; Chesterton, 1906; Langton, 1894; Gissing (Charles Dickens, a Critical Study), 1898; Cazamian (Roman social en Angleterre), 1903; Munro (Dickens et Daudet), 1908; Barlow (Genius of Dickens), 1909; W. Dibelius (Charles Dickens), Leipzig, 1922; Delattre (Les Cent Chefs-d'œuvre étrangers), idem (Dickens et la France), 1927.

(2). He denounced the new Poor Law and the workhouse system; the rigours of the penal code as of the penitentiary system; the slowness of justice; the neglect of children; the carelessnesss and cruelty of aa great number of private-school masters; the harsh laws for the protection of game; the bad state of sanitation in the poorer quarters of cities; the parallel excesses of the workers' unions and of the egoism of employers; the economic doctrine of laissez-faire and the social indifference which had been set up as a principle, etc.

Aspectos de la técnica narrativa en Hard Times, de Charles Dickens

 

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