The Age of Pope. John Dennis
with any measure of accuracy the effect of French literature on the Queen Anne authors. There is no question that they were considerably attracted by it, but its sway was, I think, never strong enough to produce mere imitative art. While the most illustrious of these men acknowledged some measure of fealty to our 'sweet enemy France,' they were not enslaved by her, and French literature was but one of several influences which affected the literary character of the age. If Englishmen owed a debt to France the obligation was reciprocal. Voltaire affords a prominent illustration of the power wielded by our literature. He imitated Addison, he imitated, or caught suggestions from Swift, he borrowed largely from Vanbrugh, and although, in his judgment of English authors, he made many critical blunders, they were due to a want of taste rather than to a want of knowledge.
A striking contrast will be seen between the position of literary men in the reign of Queen Anne and under her Hanoverian successors. Literature was not thriving in the healthiest of ways in the earlier period, but from the commercial point of view it was singularly prosperous. Through its means men like Addison and Prior rose to some of the highest offices in the service of their country. Tickell became Under-Secretary of State. Steele held three or four official posts, and if he did not prosper like some men of less mark, had no one but himself to blame. Rowe, the author of the Fair Penitent, was for three years of Anne's reign Under-Secretary, and John Hughes, the friend of Addison, who is poet enough to have had his story told by Johnson, had 'a situation of great profit' as Secretary to the Commissions of the Peace. Prizes of greater or less value fell to some men whose abilities were not more than respectable, but under Walpole and the monarch whom he served literature was disregarded, and the Minister was content to make use of hireling writers for whatever dirty work he required; spending in this way, it is said, £50,000 in ten years.
It was far better in the long run for men of letters to be free from the servility of patronage, but there was a wearisome time, as Johnson and Goldsmith knew to their cost, during which authors lost their freedom in another way, and became the slaves of the booksellers. It is pleasant to observe that the last noteworthy act of patronage in the century was one that did honour to the patron without lessening the dignity and independence of the recipient. Literature owes much to the noblest of political philosophers for discovering and fostering the genius of one of the most original of English poets, and every reader of Crabbe will do honour to the generous friendship of Edmund Burke.
II
The lowest stage in our national history was reached in the Restoration period. The idealists, who had aimed at marks it was not given to man to reach, were superseded by men with no ideal, whether in politics or religion. The extreme rigidity in morals enjoined by State authority in Cromwell's days, when theological pedantry discovered sin in what had hitherto been regarded as innocent, led, among the unsaintly mass of the people, to a hypocrisy even more corrupting than open vice, and the advent of the most publicly dissolute of English kings opened the floodgates of iniquity. The unbridled vice of the time is displayed in the Restoration dramatists, in the Grammont memoirs, in the diary of Pepys, and also in that of the admirable John Evelyn, 'faithful among the faithless.' Charles II. was considered good-natured because his manners, unlike those of his father, were sociable, and unrestrained by Court etiquette. Londoners liked a monarch who fed ducks in St. James's Park before breakfast; but an easy temper did not prevent the king from sanctioning the most unjust and cruel laws, and it allowed him to sell Dunkirk and basely to accept a pension from France. The corruption of the age pervaded politics as well as society, and the self-sacrificing spirit which is the salt of a nation's life seemed for the time extinct among public men.
When Dutch men-of-war appeared at the Nore the confusion was great, but there were few resources and few signs of energy in the men to whom the people looked for guidance. A man conversant with affairs expressed to Pepys his opinion that nothing could be done with 'a lazy Prince, no Council, no money, no reputation at home or abroad,' and Pepys also gives the damning statement which is in harmony with all we know of the king, that he 'took ten times more care and pains in making friends between my Lady Castlemaine and Mrs. Stewart, when they have fallen out, than ever he did to save his kingdom.'
There was nothing in the brief reign of James, a reign for ever made infamous by the atrocious cruelty of Jeffreys, that calls for comment here, but the Revolution, despite the undoubted advantages it brought with it, among which must be mentioned the abolition of the censorship of the press, brought also an element of discord and of political degradation. The change was a good one for the country, but it caused a large number of influential men to renounce on oath opinions which they secretly held, and it led, as every reader of history knows, to an unparalleled amount of double-dealing on the part of statesmen, which began with the accession of William and Mary and did not end until the last hopes of the Jacobites were defeated in 1746. The loss of principle among statesmen, and the bitterness of faction, which seemed to increase in proportion as the patriotic spirit declined, had a baleful influence on the latter days of the seventeenth century and on the entire period covered by the age of Pope. The low tone of the age is to be seen in the almost universal corruption which prevailed, in the scandalous tergiversation of Bolingbroke, and in the contempt for political principle openly avowed by Walpole, who, as Mr. Lecky observes, 'was altogether incapable of appreciating as an element of political calculation the force which moral sentiments exercise upon mankind.'2
The enthusiasm and strong passions of the first half of the seventeenth century, which had been crushed by the Restoration, were exchanged for a state of apathy that led to self-seeking in politics and to scepticism in religion. There was a strong profession of morality in words, but in conduct the most open immorality prevailed. Virtue was commended in the bulk of the churches, while Christianity, which gives a new life and aim to virtue, was practically ignored, and the principles of the Deists, whose opinions occupied much attention at the time, were scarcely more alien to the Christian revelation than the views often advocated in the national pulpits. The religion of Christ seems to have been regarded as little more than a useful kind of cement which held society together. The good sense advocated so constantly by Pope in poetry was also considered the principal requisite in the pulpit, and the careful avoidance of religious emotion in the earlier years of the century led to the fervid and too often ill-regulated enthusiasm that prevailed in the days of Whitefield and Wesley. At the same time there appears to have been no lack of religious controversy. 'The Church in danger' was a strong cry then, as it is still. The enormous excitement caused in 1709 by Sacheverell's sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral advocating passive obedience, denouncing toleration, and aspersing the Revolution settlement, forms a striking chapter in the reign of Queen Anne. Extraordinary interest was also felt in the Bangorian controversy raised by Bishop Hoadly, who, in a sermon preached before the king (1717), took a latitudinarian view of episcopal authority, and objected to the entire system of the High Church party.
Queen Caroline, whose keen intellect was allied to a coarseness which makes her a representative of the age, was considerably attracted by theological discussion. She obtained a bishopric for Berkeley, recommended Walpole to read Butler's Analogy, which was at one time her daily companion at the breakfast-table, and made the preferment of its author one of her last requests to the king. She liked well to reason with Dr. Samuel Clarke, 'of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate,' and wished to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, but was told that he was not sufficiently orthodox. Theology was not disregarded under the first and second Georges; it was only religion that had fallen into disrepute. The law itself was calculated to excite contempt for the most solemn of religious services. 'I was early,' Swift writes to Stella, 'with the Secretary (Bolingbroke), but he was gone to his devotions and to receive the sacrament. Several rakes did the same. It was not for piety, but for employment, according to Act of Parliament.'
A glance at some additional features in the social condition of the age will enable us to understand better the character of its literature.
III
It is a platitude to say that authors are as much affected as other men by the atmosphere which they breathe. Now and then a consummate man of genius seems to stand so much above his age as for all high purposes of art to be untouched by it. Like Milton as a poet, though not as a prose writer, his 'soul is like a star and dwells apart;' but in general, imaginative writers, are intensely affected by the
Lecky's