Chapter XXXIII (2)

31. France was very fruitful of that miscellaneous literature which, desultory and amusing, has the advantage of remaining better in the memory than more systematic books, and in fact is generally found to supply the man of extensive knowledge with the materials of his conversation, as well as to fill the vacancies of his deeper studies. The memoirs, the letters, the travels, the dialogues and essays, which might be ranged in so large a class as that we now pass in review, are too numerous to be mentioned, and it must be understood that most of them are less in request even among the studious than they were in the last century. One group has acquired the distinctive name of Ana; the reported conversation, the table-talk of the learned. Several belong to the last part of the sixteenth century, or the first of the next; the Scaligerana, the Perroniana, the Pithæana, the Naudæana, the Casauboniana; the last of which are not conversational, but fragments collected from the common-place books and loose papers of Isaac Casaubon. Two collections of the present period are very well known; the Menagiana, and the Mélanges de Littérature par Vigneul-Marville; which differs indeed from the rest in not being reported by others, but published by the author himself; yet comes so near in spirit and manner, that we may place it in the same class. The Menagiana has the common fault of these Ana, that it rather disappoints expectation, and does not give us as much new learning as the name of its author seems to promise; but it is amusing, full of light anecdote of a literary kind, and interesting to all who love the recollections of that generation. Vigneul-Marville is an imaginary person; the author of the Mélanges de Littérature is D’Argonne, a Benedictine of Rouen. This book has been much esteemed; the mask gives courage to the author, who writes, not unlike a Benedictine, but with a general tone of independent thinking, united to good judgment and a tolerably extensive knowledge of the state of literature. He had entered into the religious profession rather late in life. The Chevræana and Segraisiana, especially the latter, are of little value. The Parrhasiana of Le Clerc are less amusing and less miscellaneous than some of the Ana; but in all his writings there is a love of truth and a zeal against those who obstruct inquiry, which to congenial spirits is as pleasing as it is sure to render him obnoxious to opposite tempers.

|English style in this Period.|

32. The characteristics of English writers in the first division of the century were not maintained in the second, though the change, as was natural, did not come on by very rapid steps. The pedantry of unauthorized Latinisms, the affectation of singular and not generally intelligible words from other sources, the love of quaint phrases, strange analogies, and ambitious efforts at antithesis, gave way by degrees; a greater ease of writing was what the public demanded, and what the writers after the Restoration sought to attain; they were more strictly idiomatic and English than their predecessors. But this ease sometimes became negligence and feebleness, and often turned to coarseness and vulgarity. The language of Sevigné and Hamilton is eminently colloquial; scarce a turn occurs in their writings which they would not have used in familiar society; but theirs was the colloquy of the gods, ours of men; their idiom, though still simple and French, had been refined in the saloons of Paris, by that instinctive rejection of all that is low which the fine tact of accomplished women dictates; while in our own contemporary writers, with little exception, theirs is what defaces the dialogue of our comedy, a tone not so much of provincialism, or even of what is called the language of the common people, as of one much worse, the dregs of vulgar ribaldry, which a gentleman must clear from his conversation before he can assert that name. Nor was this confined to those who led irregular lives; the general manners being unpolished, we find in the writings of the clergy, wherever they are polemic or satirical, the same tendency to what is called _slang_; a word which, as itself belongs to the vocabulary it denotes, I use with some unwillingness. The pattern of bad writing in this respect was Sir Roger L’Estrange; his Æsop’s Fables will present everything that is hostile to good taste; yet by a certain wit and readiness in raillery L’Estrange was a popular writer and may even now be read, perhaps, with some amusement. The translation of Don Quixote, published in 1682, may also be specified as incredibly vulgar, and without the least perception of the tone which the original author has preserved.

|Hobbes.|

33. We can produce nevertheless several names of those who laid the foundations at least, and indeed furnished examples, of good style; some of them among the greatest, for other merits, in our literature. Hobbes is perhaps the first of whom we can say that he is a good English writer; for the excellent passages of Hooker, Sydney, Raleigh, Bacon, Taylor, Chillingworth, and others of the Elizabethan or the first Stuart period are not sufficient to establish their claim; a good writer being one whose composition is nearly uniform, and who never sinks to such inferiority or negligence as we must confess in most of these. To make such a writer, the absence of gross fault is full as necessary as actual beauties; we are not judging as of poets, by the highest flight of their genius, and forgiving all the rest, but as of a sum of positive and negative quantities, where the latter counterbalance and efface an equal portion of the former. Hobbes is clear, precise, spirited, and, above all, free, in general, from the faults of his predecessors; his language is sensibly less obsolete; he is never vulgar, rarely, if ever, quaint or pedantic.

|Cowley.|

34. Cowley’s prose, very unlike his verse, as Johnson has observed, is perspicuous and unaffected. His few essays may even be reckoned among the earliest models of good writing. In that, especially, on the death of Cromwell, till, losing his composure, he falls a little into the vulgar style towards the close, we find an absence of pedantry, an ease and graceful choice of idiom, an unstudied harmony of periods, which had been perceived in very few writers of the two preceding reigns. “His thoughts,” says Johnson, “are natural, and his style has a smooth and placid equability which has never yet obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far-sought or hard-laboured; but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness.”

|Evelyn.|

35. Evelyn wrote in 1651 a little piece, purporting to be an account of England by a Frenchman. It is very severe on our manners, especially in London; his abhorrence of the late revolutions in church and state conspiring with his natural politeness which he had lately improved by foreign travel. It is worth reading as illustrative of social history; but I chiefly mention it here on account of the polish and gentlemanly elegance of the style, which very few had hitherto regarded in such light compositions. An answer by some indignant patriot has been reprinted together with this pamphlet of Evelyn, and is a good specimen of the bestial ribaldry which our ancestors seem to have taken for wit.[1040] The later writings of Evelyn are such as his character and habits would lead us to expect, but I am not aware that they often rise above that respectable level, nor are their subjects such as to require an elevated style.

[1040] Both these will be found in the late edition of Evelyn’s
Miscellaneous Works.

|Dryden.|

36. Every poem and play of Dryden, as they successively appeared, was ushered into the world by those prefaces and dedications which have made him celebrated as a critic of poetry and a master of the English language. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and its subsequent Defence, the Origin and Progress of Satire, the Parallel of Poetry and Painting, the Life of Plutarch, and other things of minor importance, all prefixed to some more extensive work, complete the catalogue of his prose. The style of Dryden was very superior to any that England had seen. Not conversant with our old writers, so little, in fact, as to find the common phrases of the Elizabethan age unintelligible,[1041] he followed the taste of Charles’s reign, in emulating the politest and most popular writers in the French language. He seems to have formed himself on Montaigne, Balzac, and Voiture; but so ready was his invention, so vigorous his judgment, so complete his mastery over his native tongue, that, in point of style, he must be reckoned above all the three. He had the ease of Montaigne without his negligence and embarrassed structure of periods; he had the dignity of Balzac with more varied cadences, and without his hyperbolical tumour, the unexpected turns of Voiture without his affectation and air of effort. In the dedications especially, we find paragraphs of extraordinary gracefulness, such as possibly have never been surpassed in our language. The prefaces are evidently written in a more negligent style; he seems, like Montaigne, to converse with the reader from his arm-chair, and passes onward with little connection from one subject to another.[1042] In addressing a patron, a different line is observable; he comes with the respectful air which the occasion seems to demand; but, though I do not think that Dryden ever, in language, forgets his own position, we must confess that the flattery is sometimes palpably untrue, and always offensively indelicate. The dedication of the Mock Astrologer to the Duke of Newcastle is a masterpiece of fine writing; and the subject better deserved these lavish commendations than most who received them. That of the State of Innocence to the Duchess of York is also very well written; but the adulation is excessive. It appears to me that, after the Revolution, Dryden took less pains with his style; the colloquial vulgarisms, and these are not wanting even in his earlier prefaces, become more frequent; his periods are often of more slovenly construction; he forgets even in his dedications that he is standing before a lord. Thus, remarking on the account Andromache gives to Hector of her own history, he observes, in a style rather unworthy of him, “The devil was in Hector if he knew not all this matter as well as she who told it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together; and if he knew it then, it must be confessed that Homer in this long digression has rather given us his own character, than that of the fair lady whom he paints.”[1043]

[1041] Malone has given several proofs of this. Dryden’s Prose
Works, vol. i., part 2, p. 136, et alibi. Dryden thought
expressions wrong and incorrect in Shakspeare and Johnson which
were the current language of their age.

[1042] This is his own account. “The nature of a preface is
rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it.... This I have
learned from the practice of honest Montaigne.” Vol. iii.,
p. 605.

[1043] Vol. iii., p. 286. This is in the dedication of his third
Miscellany to Lord Ratcliffe.

|His Essay on Dramatic Poesy.|

37. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy, published in 1668, was reprinted sixteen years afterwards, and it is curious to observe the changes which Dryden made in the expression. Malone has carefully noted all these; they show both the care the author took with his own style, and the change which was gradually working in the English language.[1044] The Anglicism of terminating the sentence with a preposition is rejected.[1045] Thus “I cannot think so contemptibly of the age I live in,” is exchanged for “the age in which I live.” “A deeper expression of belief than all the actor can persuade us to,” is altered, “can insinuate into us.” And, though the old form continued in use long after the time of Dryden, it has of late years been reckoned inelegant and proscribed in all cases, perhaps with an unnecessary fastidiousness, to which I have not uniformly deferred, since our language is of a Teutonic structure, and the rules of Latin or French grammar are not always to bind us.

[1044] Vol. i., p. 136-142.

[1045] “The preposition in the end of the sentence, a common
fault with him (Ben Johnson), and which I have but lately
observed in my own writings,” p. 237. The form is, in my opinion,
sometimes emphatic and spirited, though its frequent use appears
slovenly. I remember my late friend, Mr. Richard Sharp, whose
good taste is well known, used to quote an interrogatory of
Hooker: “Shall there be a God to swear by, and none to pray to?”
as an instance of the force which this arrangement, so eminently
idiomatic, sometimes gives. It is unnecessary to say that it is
derived from the German; and nothing but Latin prejudice can make
us think it essentially wrong. In the passive voice, I think it
better than in the active; nor can it always be dispensed with,
unless we choose rather the feeble encumbering pronoun _which_.

|Improvements in his style.|

38. This Essay on Dramatic Poesy is written in dialogue; Dryden himself, under the name of Neander, being probably one of the speakers. It turns on the use of rhyme in tragedy, on the observation of the unities, and on some other theatrical questions. Dryden, at this time, was favourable to rhymed tragedies, which his practice supported. Sir Robert Howard having written some observations on that essay and taken a different view as to rhyme, Dryden published a defence of his essay in a masterly style of cutting scorn, but one hardly justified by the tone of the criticism, which had been very civil towards him; and, as he was apparently in the wrong, the air of superiority seems the more misplaced.

|His critical character.|

39. Dryden, as a critic, is not to be numbered with those who have sounded the depths of the human mind, hardly with those who analyse the language and sentiments of poets, and teach others to judge by showing why they have judged themselves. He scatters remarks, sometimes too indefinite, sometimes too arbitrary; yet his predominating good sense colours the whole; we find in them no perplexing subtlety, no cloudy nonsense, no paradoxes and heresies in taste to revolt us. Those he has made on translation in the preface to that of Ovid’s Epistles are valuable. “No man,” he says, “is capable of translating poetry, who besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author’s language and of his own. Nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers.”[1046] We cannot pay Dryden the compliment of saying that he gave the example as well as precept, especially in his Virgil. He did not scruple to copy Segrais in his discourse on Epic Poetry. “Him I follow, and what I borrow from him am ready to acknowledge to him; for, impartially speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English as they are worse poets.”[1047]

[1046] Vol. iii., p. 19.

[1047] P. 460. The quotations in this paragraph present two
instances of the word _to_ in an unauthorised usage; the second is
a Gallicism; but the first has not even that excuse.

40. The greater part of his critical writings relates to the drama; a subject with which he was very conversant; but he had some considerable prejudices; he seems never to have felt the transcendent excellence of Shakspeare; and sometimes, perhaps, his own opinions, if not feigned, are biased by that sort of self-defence to which he thought himself driven in the prefaces to his several plays. He had many enemies on the watch; the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, a satire of great wit, had exposed to ridicule the heroic tragedies,[1048] and many were afterwards ready to forget the merits of the poet in the delinquencies of the politician. “What Virgil wrote,” he says, “in the vigour of his age, in plenty and in ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed by sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me by the lying character which has been given them of my morals.”[1049]

[1048] This comedy was published in 1672; the parodies are
amusing; and though parody is the most unfair weapon that
ridicule can use, they are in most instances warranted by the
original. Bayes, whether he resembles Dryden or not, is a very
comic personage: the character is said by Johnson to have been
sketched for Davenant; but I much doubt this report; Davenant had
been dead some years before the Rehearsal was published, and
could have been in no way obnoxious to its satire.

[1049] Vol. iii., p. 557.

|Rymer on Tragedy.|

41. Dryden will hardly be charged with abandoning too hastily our national credit, when he said the French were better critics than the English. We had scarcely anything worthy of notice to alledge beyond his own writings. The Theatrum Poetarum by Philips, nephew of Milton, is superficial in every respect. Thomas Rymer, best known to mankind as the editor of the Fœdera, but a strenuous advocate for the Aristotelian principles in the drama, published, in 1678, “The Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the common Sense of all Ages.” This contains a censure of some plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakspeare and Jonson. “I have chiefly considered the fable or plot which all conclude to be the soul of a tragedy, which with the ancients is always found to be a reasonable soul, but with us for the most part a brutish, and often worse than brutish.”[1050] I have read only his criticisms on the Maid’s Tragedy, King and no King, and Rollo; and as the conduct and characters of all three are far enough from being invulnerable, it is not surprising that Rymer has often well exposed them.

[1050] P. 4.

|Sir William Temple’s Essays.|

42. Next to Dryden, the second place among the polite writers of the period, from the Restoration to the end of the century, has commonly been given to Sir William Temple. His Miscellanies, to which, principally, this praise belongs, are not recommended by more erudition than a retired statesman might acquire, with no great expense of time, nor by much originality of reflection. But if Temple has not profound knowledge, he turns all he possesses well to account; if his thoughts are not very striking, they are commonly just. He has less eloquence than Bolingbroke, but is also free from his restlessness and ostentation. Much, also, which now appears superficial in Temple’s historical surveys, was far less familiar in his age; he has the merit of a comprehensive and a candid mind. His style, to which we should particularly refer, will be found in comparison with his contemporaries highly polished, and sustained with more equability than they preserve, remote from anything either pedantic or humble. The periods are studiously rhythmical; yet they want the variety and peculiar charm that we admire in those of Dryden.

|Style of Locke.|

43. Locke is certainly a good writer, relatively to the greater part of his contemporaries; his plain and manly sentences often give us pleasure by the wording alone. But he has some defects; in his Essay on the Human Understanding he is often too figurative for the subject. In all his writings, and especially in the Treatise on Education, he is occasionally negligent, and though not vulgar, at least according to the idiom of his age, slovenly in the structure of his sentences as well as the choice of his words; he is not, in mere style, very forcible, and certainly not very elegant.

|Sir George Mackenzie’s Essays.|

|Andrew Fletcher.|

44. The Essays of Sir George Mackenzie are empty and diffuse; the style is full of pedantic words to a degree of barbarism; and though they were chiefly written after the Revolution, he seems to have wholly formed himself on the older writers, such as Sir Thomas Browne, or even Feltham. He affects the obsolete and unpleasing termination of the third person of the verb in _eth_, which was going out of use even in the pulpit, besides other rust of archaism. Nothing can be more unlike the manner of Dryden, Locke, or Temple. In his matter he seems a mere declaimer, as if the world would any longer endure the trivial morality which the sixteenth century had borrowed from Seneca, or the dull ethics of sermons. It is probable that, as Mackenzie was a man who had seen and read much, he must have some better passages than I have found in glancing shortly at his works. His countryman, Andrew Fletcher, is a better master of English style; he writes with purity, clearness, and spirit; but the substance is so much before his eyes, that he is little solicitous about language. And a similar character may be given to many of the political tracts in the reign of William. They are well expressed for their purpose; their English is perspicuous, unaffected, often forcible, and, upon the whole, much superior to that of similar writings in the reign of Charles; but they do not challenge a place of which their authors never dreamed; they are not to be counted in the polite literature of England.

|Walton’s Complete Angler.|

45. I may have overlooked, or even never known, some books of sufficient value to deserve mention; and I regret that the list of miscellaneous literature should be so short. But it must be confessed that our golden age did not begin before the eighteenth century, and then with him who has never since been rivalled in grace, humour, and invention. Walton’s Complete Angler, published in 1653, seems by the title a strange choice out of all the books of half a century; yet its simplicity, its sweetness, its natural grace, and happy intermixture of graver strains with the precepts of angling, have rendered this book deservedly popular, and a model which one of the most famous among our late philosophers, and a successful disciple of Isaac Walton in his favourite art, has condescended to imitate.

|Wilkin’s New World.|

46. A book, not indeed remarkable for its style, but one which I could hardly mention in any less miscellaneous chapter than the present, though, since it was published in 1638, it ought to have been mentioned before, is Wilkin’s “Discovery of a New World, or a Discourse tending to prove that it is probable there may be another habitable World in the Moon, with a Discourse concerning the Possibility of a Passage thither.” This is one of the births of that inquiring spirit, that disdain of ancient prejudice, which the seventeenth century produced. Bacon was undoubtedly the father of it in England; but Kepler, and above all Galileo, by the new truths they demonstrated, made men fearless in investigation and conjecture. The geographical discoveries indeed of Columbus and Magellan had prepared the way for conjectures, hardly more astonishing in the eyes of the vulgar than those had been. Wilkins accordingly begins by bringing a host of sage writers who had denied the existence of antipodes. He expressly maintains the Copernican theory, but admits that it was generally reputed a novel paradox. The arguments on the other side he meets at some length, and knew how to answer, by the principles of compound motion, the plausible objection that stones falling from a tower were not left behind by the motion of the earth. The spots in the moon he took for sea, and the brighter parts for land. A lunar atmosphere he was forced to hold, and gives reasons for thinking it probable. As to inhabitants, he does not dwell long on the subject. Campanella, and long before him Cardinal Cusanus, had believed the sun and moon to be inhabited,[1051] and Wilkins ends by saying: “Being content for my own part to have spoken so much of it, as may conduce to show the opinion of others concerning the inhabitants of the moon, I dare not myself affirm anything of these Selenites, because I know not any ground whereon to build any probable opinion. But I think that future ages will discover more, and our posterity perhaps may invent some means for our better acquaintance with those inhabitants.” To this he comes as his final proposition, that it may be possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world; and if there be inhabitants there, to have communication with them. But this chapter is the worst in the book, and shows that Wilkins, notwithstanding his ingenuity, had but crude notions on the principles of physics. He followed this up by what I have not seen, a “Discourse concerning a new planet; tending to prove that it is possible our earth is one of the planets.” This appears to be a regular vindication of the Copernican theory, and was published in 1640.

[1051] Suspicamur in regione solis magis esse solares, claros et
illuminatos intellectuales habitatores, spiritualiores etiam quam
in luna, ubi magis lunatici, et in terra magis materiales et
crassi, ut illi intellectualis naturæ solares sint multum in actu
et parum in potentiâ, terreni vero magis in potentia et parum in
actu, lunares in medio fluctuantes, &c. Cusanus apud Wilkins,
p. 103 (edit. 1802).

|Antiquity defended by Temple.|

|Wotton’s Reflections.|

47. The cause of antiquity, so rudely found support in Sir William Temple, assailed abroad by Perrault and Fontenelle, who has defended it in one of his essays with more zeal than prudence or knowledge of the various subjects on which he contends for the rights of the past. It was in fact such a credulous and superficial view as might have been taken by a pedant of the sixteenth century. For it is in science, taking the word largely, full as much as in works of genius, that he denies the ancients to have been surpassed. Temple’s Essay, however, was translated into French, and he was supposed by many to have made a brilliant vindication of injured antiquity. But it was soon refuted in the most solid book that was written in any country upon this famous dispute. William Wotton published in 1694 his Reflections on ancient and modern Learning.[1052] He draws very well in this the line between Temple and Perrault, avoiding the tasteless judgment of the latter in poetry and eloquence, but pointing out the superiority of the moderns in the whole range of physical science.

[1052] Wotton had been a boy of astonishing precocity; at six
years old he could readily translate Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; at
seven he added some knowledge of Arabic and Syriac. He entered
Catherine Hall, Cambridge, in his tenth year; at thirteen, when
he took the degree of bachelor of arts, he was acquainted with
twelve languages. There being no precedent of granting a degree
to one so young, a special record of his extraordinary
proficiency was made in the registers of the university. Monk’s
Life of Bentley, p. 7.

SECT. II.

ON FICTION.

_French Romances--La Fayette and others--Pilgrim’s Progress--Turkish Spy._

|Quevedo’s Visions.|

48. Spain had about the middle of this century a writer of various literature, who is only known in Europe by his fictions, Quevedo. His visions and his life of the great Tacaño, were early translated, and became very popular.[1053] They may be reckoned superior to anything in comic romance, except Don Quixote, that the seventeenth century produced; and yet this commendation is not a high one. In the picaresque style, the life of Tacaño is tolerably amusing; but Quevedo, like others, has long since been surpassed. The Sueños, or Visions, are better; they show spirit and sharpness with some originality of invention. But Las Zahurdas de Pluton, which, like the other sueños, bears a general resemblance to the Pilgrim’s Progress, being an allegorical dream, is less powerfully and graphically written; the satire is also rather too obvious. “Lucian,” says Bouterwek, “furnished him with the original idea of satirical visions; but Quevedo’s were the first of their kind in modern literature. Owing to frequent imitations, their faults are no longer disguised by the charm of novelty, and even their merits have ceased to interest.”[1054]

[1053] The translation of this, “made English by a person of
honour” takes great liberties with the original, and endeavours
to excel it in wit by means of frequent interpolation.

[1054] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 471.

|French heroic romances.|

49. No species of composition seems less adapted to the genius of the French nation in the reign of Louis XIV. than the heroic romances so much admired in its first years. It must be confessed that this was but the continuance, and in some respect possibly, an improvement of a long established style of fiction. But it was not fitted to endure reason or ridicule, and the societies of Paris knew the use of both weapons. Molière sometimes tried his wit upon the romances; and Boileau, rather later in the day, when the victory had been won, attacked Mademoiselle Scudery with his sarcastic irony in a dialogue on the heroes of her invention.

|Novels of Madame La Fayette.|

50. The first step in descending from the heroic romance was to ground not altogether dissimilar. The feats of chivalry were replaced by less wonderful adventures; the love became less hyperbolical in expression, though not less intensely engrossing the personages; the general tone of manners was lowered down better to that of nature, or at least of an ideality which the imagination did not reject; a style already tried in the minor fictions of Spain. The earliest novels that demand attention in this line are those of the Countess de la Fayette, celebrated while Mademoiselle de la Vergne under the name of Laverna in the Latin poetry of Menage.[1055] Zayde, the first of these, is entirely in the Spanish style; the adventures are improbable, but various and rather interesting to those who carry no scepticism into fiction; the language is polished and agreeable, though not very animated; and it is easy to perceive that while that kind of novel was popular, Zayde would obtain a high place. It has, however, the usual faults; the story is broken by intervening narratives, which occupy too large a space; the sorrows of the principal characters excite, at least as I should judge, little sympathy; and their sentiments and emotions are sometimes too much refined in the alembic of the Hôtel Rambouillet. In a later novel, the Princess of Cleves, Madame La Fayette threw off the affectation of that circle to which she had once belonged, and though perhaps Zayde is, or was in its own age, the more celebrated novel, it seems to me that in this she has excelled herself. The story, being nothing else than the insuperable and insidious, but not guilty, attachment of a married lady to a lover, required a delicacy and correctness of taste which the authoress has well displayed in it. The probability of the incidents, the natural course they take, the absence of all complication and perplexity, give such an inartificial air to this novel, that we can scarcely help believing it to shadow forth some real event. A modern novelist would probably have made more of the story; the style is always calm, sometimes almost languid; a tone of decorous politeness, like that of the French stage, is never relaxed; but it is precisely by this means that the writer has kept up a moral dignity, of which it would have been so easy to lose sight. The Princess of Cleves is perhaps the first work of mere invention (for though the characters are historical, there is no known foundation for the story) which brought forward the manners of the aristocracy; it may be said, the contemporary manners; for Madame La Fayette must have copied her own times. As this has become a popular theme of fiction, it is just to commemorate the novel which introduced it.

[1055] The name Laverna, though well-sounding, was in one respect
unlucky, being that given by antiquity to the goddess of thieves.
An epigram on Menage, almost, perhaps, too trite to be quoted, is
_piquant_ enough:

Lesbia nulla tibi, nulla est tibi dicta Corinna;
Carmine laudatur Cynthia nulla tuo.
Sed cum doctorum compilas scrinia vatum,
Nil mirum, si sit culta Laverna tibi.

|Scarron’s Roman Comique.|

51. The French have few novels of this class in the seventeenth century which they praise; those of Madame Villedieu, or Des Jardins, may deserve to be excepted; but I have not seen them. Scarron, a man deformed and diseased, but endowed with vast gaiety, which generally exuberated in buffoon jests, has the credit of having struck out into a new path by his Roman Comique. The Spaniards, however, had so much like this that we cannot perceive any great originality in Scarron. The Roman Comique is still well known, and if we come to it in vacant moments, will serve its end in amusing us; the story and characters have no great interest, but they are natural; yet, without the least disparagement to the vivacity of Scarron, it is still true that he has been left at an immense distance in observation of mankind, in humorous character, and in ludicrous effect by the novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is said that Scarron’s romance is written in a pure style; and some have even pretended that he has not been without effect in refining the language. The Roman Bourgeois of Furetière appears to be a novel of middle life; it had some reputation, but I cannot speak of it with any knowledge.

|Cyrano de Bergerac.|

|Segrais.|

52. Cyrano de Bergerac had some share in directing the public taste towards those extravagances of fancy which were afterwards highly popular. He has been imitated himself, as some have observed, by Swift and Voltaire, and I should add, to a certain degree, by Hamilton; but all the three have gone far beyond him. He is not himself a very original writer. His Voyage to the Moon and History of the Empire of the Sun are manifestly suggested by the True History of Lucian; and he had modern fictions, especially the Voyage to the Moon by Godwin, mentioned in our last volume, which he had evidently read, to imp the wings of an invention not perhaps eminently fertile. Yet Bergerac has the merit of being never wearisome; his fictions are well conceived, and show little effort, which seems also the character of his language in this short piece; though his letters had been written in the worst style of affectation, so as to make us suspect that he was turning the manner of some contemporaries into ridicule. The novels of Segrais such at least as I have seen, are mere pieces of light satire, designed to amuse by transient allusions the lady by whom he was patronized, Mademoiselle de Montpensier. If they deserve any regard at all, it is as links in the history of fiction between the mock-heroic romance, of which Voiture had given an instance, and the style of fantastic invention, which was perfected by Hamilton.

|Perrault.|

53. Charles Perrault may, so far as I know, be said to have invented a kind of fiction which became extremely popular, and has had, even after it ceased to find direct imitators, a perceptible influence over the lighter literature of Europe. The idea was original, and happily executed. Perhaps he sometimes took the tales of children, such as the tradition of many generations had delivered them; but much of his fairy machinery seems to have been his own, and I should give him credit for several of the stories, though it is hard to form a guess. He gave to them all a real interest, as far as could be, with a naturalness of expression, an arch naïveté, a morality neither too obvious nor too refined, and a slight poignancy of satire on the world, which render the Tales of Mother Goose almost a counterpart in prose to the Fables of La Fontaine.

|Hamilton.|

54. These amusing fictions caught the fancy of an indolent but not stupid nobility. The court of Versailles and all Paris resounded with fairy tales; it became the popular style for more than half a century. But few of these fall within our limits. Perrault’s immediate followers, Madame Murat and the Countess D’Aunoy, especially the latter, have some merit; but they come very short of the happy simplicity and brevity we find in Mother Goose’s Tales. It is possible that Count Antony Hamilton may have written those tales which have made him famous before the end of the century, though they were published later. But these with many admirable strokes of wit and invention, have too forced a tone in both these qualities; the labour is too evident, and, thrown away on such trifling, excites something like contempt; they are written for an exclusive coterie, not for the world; and the world in all such cases will sooner or later take its revenge. Yet Hamilton’s tales are incomparably superior to what followed; inventions alternately dull and extravagant, a style negligent or mannered, an immorality passing onward from the licentiousness of the Regency to the debased philosophy of the ensuing age, became the general characteristics of these fictions, which finally expired in the neglect and scorn of the world.

|Télémaque of Fenelon.|

55. The Télémaque of Fenelon, after being suppressed in France, appeared in Holland clandestinely without the author’s consent in 1699. It is needless to say that it soon obtained the admiration of Europe, and perhaps there is no book in the French language that has been more read. Fenelon seems to have conceived that, metre not being essential, as he assumed, to poetry, he had, by imitating the Odyssey in Télémaque, produced an epic of as legitimate a character as his model. But the boundaries between epic poetry, especially such epics as the Odyssey, and romance were only perceptible by the employment of verse in the former; no elevation of character, no ideality of conception, no charm of imagery or emotion had been denied to romance. The language of poetry had for two centuries been seized for its use. Télémaque must therefore take its place among romances; but still it is true that no romance had breathed so classical a spirit, none had abounded so much with the richness of poetical language, much in fact of Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles having been woven in with no other change than verbal translation, nor had any preserved such dignity in its circumstances, such beauty, harmony, and nobleness in its diction. It would be as idle to say that Fenelon was indebted to D’Urfé and Calprenede, as to deny that some degree of resemblance may be found in their poetical prose. The one belonged to the morals of chivalry, generous but exaggerated; the other to those of wisdom and religion. The one has been forgotten because its tone is false; the other is ever admired, and is only less regarded because it is true in excess; because it contains too much of what we know. Télémaque, like some other of Fenelon’s writings, is to be considered in reference to its object; an object of all the noblest, being to form the character of one to whom many must look up for their welfare, but still very different from the inculcation of profound truth. The beauties of Télémaque are very numerous; the descriptions, and indeed the whole tone of the book, have a charm of grace, something like the pictures of Guido; but there is also a certain languor which steals over us in reading, and though there is no real want of variety in the narration, it reminds us so continually of its source, the Homeric legends, as to become rather monotonous. The abandonment of verse has produced too much diffuseness; it will be observed, if we look attentively, that where Homer is circumstantial, Fenelon is more so; in this he sometimes approaches the minuteness of the romancers. But these defects are more than compensated by the moral, and even æsthetic excellence of this romance.

|Deficiency of English romances.|

56. If this most fertile province of all literature, as we have now discovered it to be, had yielded so little even in France, a nation that might appear eminently fitted to explore it, down to the close of the seventeenth century, we may be less surprised at the greater deficiency of our own country. Yet the scarcity of original fiction in England was so great as to be inexplicable by any reasoning. The public taste was not incapable of being pleased; for all the novels and romances of the continent were readily translated. The manners of all classes were as open to humorous description, the imagination was as vigorous, the heart as susceptible as in other countries. But not only we find nothing good; it can hardly be said that we find anything at all that has ever attracted notice in English romance. The Parthenissa of Lord Orrery, in the heroic style, and the short novels of Afra Behn, are nearly as many, perhaps, as could be detected in old libraries. We must leave the beaten track before we can place a single work in this class.

|Pilgrim’s Progress.|

57. The Pilgrim’s Progress essentially belongs to it, and John Bunyan may pass for the father of our novelists. His success in a line of composition like the spiritual romance or allegory, which seems to have been frigid and unreadable in the few instances where it had been attempted, is doubtless enhanced by his want of all learning and his low station in life. He was therefore rarely, if ever, an imitator; he was never enchained by rules. Bunyan possessed in a remarkable degree the power of representation; his inventive faculty was considerable, but the other is his distinguishing excellence. He saw, and makes us see, what he describes; he is circumstantial without prolixity, and in the variety and frequent change of his incidents, never loses sight of the unity of his allegorical fable. His invention was enriched, and rather his choice determined, by one rule he had laid down to himself, the adaptation of all the incidental language of scripture to his own use. There is scarce a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find a place, bodily and literally, in the story of the Pilgrim’s Progress; and this peculiar artifice has made his own imagination appear more creative than it really is. In the conduct of the romance no rigorous attention to the propriety of the allegory seems to have been uniformly preserved. Vanity Fair, or the cave of the two giants, might, for anything we see, have been placed elsewhere; but it is by this neglect of exact parallelism that he better keeps up the reality of the pilgrimage, and takes off the coldness of mere allegory. It is also to be remembered that we read this book at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little perceived or little regarded. In his language, nevertheless, Bunyan sometimes mingles the signification too much with the fable; we might be perplexed between the imaginary and the real Christian; but the liveliness of narration soon brings us back, or did at least when we were young, to the fields of fancy. Yet, the Pilgrim’s Progress, like some other books, has of late been a little over-rated; its excellence is great, but it is not of the highest rank, and we should be careful not to break down the landmarks of fame by placing the John Bunyans and the Daniel De Foes among the Dii Majores of our worship.

|Turkish spy.|

58. I am inclined to claim for England not the invention, but, for the most part, the composition of another book which, being grounded on fiction, may be classed here, The Turkish Spy. A secret emissary of the Porte is supposed to remain at Paris in disguise for above forty years, from 1635 to 1682. His correspondence with a number of persons, various in situation, and with whom therefore his letters assume various characters, is protracted through eight volumes. Much, indeed most, relates to the history of those times and to the anecdotes connected with it; but in these we do not find a large proportion of novelty. The more remarkable letters are those which run into metaphysical and theological speculation. These are written with an earnest seriousness, yet with an extraordinary freedom, such as the feigned garb of a Mohammedan could hardly have exempted from censure in catholic countries. Mahmud, the mysterious writer, stands on a sort of eminence above all human prejudice; he was privileged to judge as a stranger of the religion and philosophy of Europe; but his bold spirit ranges over the field of Oriental speculation. The Turkish Spy is no ordinary production, but contains as many proofs of a thoughtful, if not very profound mind, as any we can find. It suggested the Persian Letters to Montesquieu and the Jewish to Argens; the former deviating from his model with the originality of talent, the latter following it with a more servile closeness. Probability, that is, a resemblance to the personated character of an Oriental, was not to be attained, nor was it desirable, in any of these fictions; but Mahmud has something not European, something of a solitary insulated wanderer, gazing on a world that knows him not, which throws, to my feelings, a striking charm over the Turkish Spy; while the Usbek of Montesquieu has become more than half Parisian; his ideas are neither those of his birthplace, nor such as have sprung up unbidden from his soul, but those of a polite, witty, and acute society; and the correspondence with his harem in Persia, which Montesquieu has thought attractive to the reader, is not much more interesting than it is probable, and ends in the style of a common romance. As to the Jewish Letters of Argens, it is far inferior to the Turkish Spy, and, in fact, rather an insipid book.

|Chiefly of English origin.|

59. It may be asked why I dispute the claim made by all the foreign biographers in favour of John Paul Marana, a native of Genoa, who is asserted to have published the first volume of the Turkish Spy at Paris in 1684, and the rest in subsequent years.[1056] But I am not disputing that Marana is the author of the thirty letters, published in 1684, and of twenty more in 1686, which have been literally translated into English, and form about half the first volume in English of our Turkish spy.[1057] Nor do I doubt in the least that the remainder of that volume had a French original; though it happens that I have not seen it. But the later volumes of the Espion Turc, in the edition of 1696, with the date of Cologne, which, according to Barbier, is put for Rouen,[1058] are avowedly translated from the English. And to the second volume of our Turkish Spy, published in 1691, is prefixed an account, not very credible, of the manner in which the volumes subsequent to the first had been procured by a traveller in the original Italian; no French edition, it is declared, being known to the booksellers. That no Italian edition ever existed, is, I apprehend, now generally admitted; and it is to be shown by those who contend for the claims of Marana, to seven out of the eight volumes, that they were published in France before 1691 and the subsequent years, when they appeared in English. The Cologne or Rouen edition of 1696 follows the English so closely that it has not given the original letters of the first volume, published with the name of Marana, but rendered them back from the translation.

[1056] This first portion was published at Paris and also at
Amsterdam. Bayle gives the following account. Cet ouvrage a été
contrefait à Amsterdam du consentement du libraire de Paris, qui
l’a le premier imprimé. Il sera composé de plusieurs petits
volumes qui contiendront les événemens les plus considérables de
la chrétienté en général, et de la France en particulier, depuis
l’année 1637 jusqu’en 1682. Un Italien natif de Gênes, Marana,
donne ces rélations pour des lettres écrites aux ministres de la
Porte par un espion Turc qui se tenoit caché à Paris. Il prétend
les avoir traduites de l’Arabe en Italien: et il raconte fort en
long comment il les a trouvées. On soupçonne avec beaucoup
d’apparence, que c’est un tour d’esprit Italien, et une fiction
ingénieuse semblable à celle dont Virgile s’est servi pour louer
Auguste, &c. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres; Mars, 1684;
in Œuvres diverses de Bayle, vol. i., p. 20. The Espion Turc is
not to be traced in the index to the Journal des Sçavans; nor is
it noticed in the Bibliothèque Universelle.

[1057] Salfi, xiv., 61. Biograph. Univers.

[1058] Dictionnaire des Anonymes, vol. i., p. 406. Barbier’s
notice of L’Espion dans les cours des princes Chrétiens ascribes
four volumes out of six, which appear to contain as much as our
eight volumes, to Marana, and conjectures that the last two are
by another hand; but does not intimate the least suspicion of an
English original. And as his authority is considerable, I must
fortify my own opinion by what evidence I can find.

The preface to the second volume (English) of the Turkish Spy
begins thus: “Three years are now elapsed since the first volume
of letters written by a Spy at Paris was published in English.
And it was expected that a second should have come out long
before this. The favourable reception which that found amongst
all sorts of readers would have encouraged a speedy translation
of the rest, had there been extant any French edition of more
than the first part. _But after the strictest inquiry none
could be heard of_; and, as for the Italian, our booksellers
have not that correspondence in those parts as they have in the
more neighbouring countries of France and Holland. So that it was
a work despaired of to recover any more of this Arabian’s
memoirs. We little dreamed that the Florentines had been so busy
in printing, and so successful in selling the continued
translation of these Arabian epistles, till it was the fortune of
an English gentleman to travel in those parts last summer, and
discover the happy news. I will not forestall his letter which is
annexed to this preface.” A pretended letter with the signature
of Daniel Saltmarsh follows, in which the imaginary author tells
a strange tale of the manner in which a certain learned physician
of Ferrara, Julio de Medici, descended from the Medicean family,
put these volumes, in the Italian language, into his hands. This
letter is dated Amsterdam, Sept. 9, 1690, and as the preface
refers it to the last summer, I hence conclude that the first
edition of the second volume of the Turkish Spy was in 1691; for
I have not seen that, nor any other edition earlier than the
fifth, printed in 1702.

Marana is said by Salfi and others to have left France in 1689,
having fallen into a depression of spirits. Now the first thirty
letters, about one thirty-second part of the entire work, were
published in 1684, and about an equal length in 1686. I admit
that he had time to double these portions, and thus to publish
one-eighth of the whole; but is it likely that between 1686 and
1689 he could have given the rest to the world? If we are not
struck by this, is it likely that the English translator should
have fabricated the story above mentioned, when the public might
know that there was actually a French original which he had
rendered? The invention seems without motive. Again, how came the
French edition of 1696 to be an avowed translation from the
English, when, according to the hypothesis of M. Barbier, the
volumes of Marana had all been published in France? Surely, till
these appear, we have reason to suspect their existence; and the
_onus probandi_ lies _now_ on the advocates of Marana’s
claim.

60. In these early letters, I am ready to admit, the scheme of the Turkish Spy may be entirely traced. Marana appears not only to have planned the historical part of the letters, but to have struck out the more original and striking idea of a Mohammedan wavering with religious scruples, which the English continuator has followed up with more philosophy and erudition. The internal evidence for their English origin, in all the latter volumes, is to my apprehension exceedingly strong; but I know the difficulty of arguing from this to convince a reader. The proof we demand is the production of these volumes in French, that is, the specification of some public or private library where they may be seen, in any edition anterior to 1691, and nothing short of this can be satisfactory evidence.[1059]

[1059] I shall now produce some direct evidence for the English
authorship of seven out of eight parts of the Turkish Spy.