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mortal poem beneath as fresh, as melodious, as inspiring as ever. With regard to the two great Pindaric odes, criticism has by no means spoken with the same unanimity. The contemporaries of Gray found these elaborate pieces difficult to the verge of unintelligibility. Later critics, who have not pretended to find them unmeaning, have yet objected to their overblown magnificence, their excess of allegorical apparatus, and their too manifest metrical artifice. That they do not belong to the school of simplicity may be freely admitted, but there are certain themes, suggestively described by De Quincey, in the treatment of which simplicity is out of place. The Progress of Poesy and the prophetic raptures of a dying bard may be recognised as belonging to the same class of subjects as Belshazzar's Feast. The qualities rather to be regarded in these elaborate pieces of poetic art are their originality of structure, the varied music of their balanced strophes, as of majestic antiphonal choruses answering one another in some antique temple, and the extraordinary skill with which the evolution of the theme is observed and restrained. It is in this latter characteristic that Gray shows himself, as an artist, to be far superior to Collins. The student will not fail, in some of Gray's minor writings, in the sonorous Stanzas to Mr. Bentley, in the thrilling flute-like tones and nature-sketches of the fragmentary Ode on Vicissitude, in the Gothic picturesqueness of The Descent of Odin, to detect notes and phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his 'more famous writings, and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was coming. The faults of Gray's poetry are obvious, especially in his earlier writing; they are the results of an exaggerated taste for rhetoric and for allegory. But the main features of his work are such that we may frankly acknowledge him to have succeeded when he tells us that "the style I have aimed at is extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical,"

CHAPTER VIII

THE NOVELISTS

THERE is nothing offensive to the dignity of literary history in acknowledging that the most prominent piece of work effected by literature in England during the eighteenth century is the creation, for it can be styled nothing less, of the modern novel. In the seventeenth century there had been a very considerable movement in the direction of prose fiction. The pastoral romances of the Elizabethans had continued to circulate; France had set an example in the heroic stories of D'Urfé and La Calprenède, which English imitators and translators had been quick to follow, even as early as 1647. The Francion of Sorel and the Roman Bourgeois of Furetière (the latter, published in 1666, of especial interest to students of the English novel) had prepared the way for the exact opposite to the heroic romance, namely, the realistic story of everyday life. Bunyan and Richard Head, Mrs. Behn and Defoe-each had marked a stage in the development of English fiction. Two noble forerunners of the modern novel, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, had inflamed the curiosity and awakened the appetite of British readers; but, although there were already great satires and great romances in the language, the first quarter of the eighteenth century passed away without revealing any domestic genius in prose fiction, any master of the workings of the human heart. Meanwhile the drama had decayed. The audiences which had attended the poetic plays of the beginning and the comedies of

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close of the seventeenth century now found nothing on the boards of the theatre to satisfy their craving after intellectual excitement. The descendants of the men and women who had gone out to welcome the poetry of Shakespeare and the wit of Congreve were now rather readers than playgoers, and were most ready to enjoy an appeal to their feelings when that appeal reached them in book form. In the playhouse, they came to expect bustle and pantomine rather than literature. This decline in theatrical habits prepared a domestic audience for the novelists, and accounts for that feverish and apparently excessive anxiety with which the earliest great novels were awaited and received.

Meanwhile, the part taken by Addison and Steele in preparing for this change of taste must not be overlooked, and the direct link between Addison, as a picturesque narrative essayist, and Richardson, as the first great English novelist, is to be found in Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763), who imitated the Spectator, and who is often assumed, though somewhat too rashly, to have suggested the tone of Pamela. Into this latter question we shall presently have need to inquire again. It is enough to point out here that when the English novel did suddenly and irresistibly make its appearance, it had little in common with the rococo and coquettish work which had immediately preceded it in France, and which at first, even to judges so penetrating as the poet Gray, was apt to seem more excellent, because more subtle and refined. The rapidity with which the novel became domiciled amongst us, and the short space of time within which the principal masterpieces of the novelists were produced, are not more remarkable than the lassitude which fell upon English fiction as soon as the first great generation had passed away. The flourishing period of the eighteenth-century novel lasted exactly twenty-five years, during which time we have to record the publication of no less than fifteen eminent works of fiction. These fifteen are naturally divided into three groups. The first contains Pamela, Joseph Andrews, David Simple, and Jonathan Wild. In these books the art is still somewhat crude, and the science of fiction incom

pletely understood. After a silence of five years we reach the second and greatest section of this central period, during which there appeared, in quick succession, Clarissa, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, Amelia, and Sir Charles Grandison. As though invention had been exhausted by the publication of this incomparable series of masterpieces, there followed another silence of five years, and then were issued, each on the heels of the other, Tristram Shandy, Rasselas, Chrysal, The Castle of Otranto, and The Vicar of Wakefield. Five years later still, a book born out of due time, appeared Humphrey Clinker, and then, with one or two such exceptions as Evelina and Caleb Williams, no great novel appeared again in England for forty years, until, in 1811, the new school of fiction was inaugurated by Sense and Sensibility. The English novel, therefore, in its first great development, should be considered as comprised within the dates 1740 and 1766; and it may not be uninstructive, before entering into any critical examination of the separate authors, to glance at this chronological list of the first fifteen great works of English fiction.

The novels contained in the catalogue just given, however widely they differed from one another in detail, had this in common, that they dealt with mental and moral phenomena. Before 1740 we possessed romances, tales, prose fiction of various sorts, but in none of these was essayed any careful analysis of character or any profound delineation of emotion. In Defoe, where the record of imaginary fact was carried on with so much ingenuity and knowledge, the qualities we have just mentioned are notably absent; nor can it be said that we find them in any prose-writer of fiction earlier than Richardson, except in some very slight and imperfect degree in Aphra Behn, especially in her Rousseauish novel of Oroonoko. Before, indeed, we begin to chronicle the feats of the novelists, we have to deal with the last of the old school of romance-writers, whose solitary work appeared when Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were in the midst of their successes. This was Robert Paltock (1697?-1767?) of Clement's Inn, of whom nothing is certainly known, save that, in

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1751, he published, in two volumes, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a sailor who was shipwrecked near the South Pole, and who fell in with a wonderful winged race of Glums and Gawries, one of whom, the beautiful Youwarkee, he found fainting outside his hut, and afterwards married. On taking her up, "I found she had a sort of brown chaplet, like lace, round her head, under and about which her hair was tucked up and twined; and she seemed to me to be clothed in a thin hair-coloured silk garment, which, upon trying to raise her, I found to be quite warm, and therefore hoped there was life in the body it contained."

This book is not so skilfully imagined as Robinson Crusoe, to which it owes not a little; but the strange people, winged with graundees or throbbing crimson robes of their own skin, are described with a charming fancy, and Peter Wilkins will never want admirers. It belongs, however, to the old school, and was probably written before the publication of Pamela.

The first great English novelist, Samuel Richardson (16891761), was born and bred in Derbyshire. He records of himself that when still a little boy he had two peculiarities-he loved the society of women best, and he delighted in letter-writing. Indeed, before he was eleven, he wrote a long epistle to a widow of fifty, rebuking her for unbecoming conduct. The girls of the neighbourhood soon discovered his insight into the human heart, and his skill in correspondence, and they employed the boy to write their love-letters for them. In 1706 Richardson was apprenticed to a London printer, served a diligent apprenticeship, and worked as a compositor until he rose, late in life, to be Master of the Stationers' Company. He was fifty years of age before he showed symptoms of any higher ambition than that of printing correctly Acts of Parliament and new editions of law-books. In 1739 the publishers, Rivington and Osborne, urged him to compose for them a volume of Familiar Letters, afterwards actually produced as an aid to illiterate persons in their correspondence. Richardson set about this work, gave it a moral flavour, and at last began to write what would serve as a caution to young serving