of town and country, knowledge and ignorance, wealth and poverty, because they are moralists and utilitarians; because they look in a book for the knowledge to turn them from folly, and motives to confirm them in uprightness; because they cultivate in themselves sense, that is to say, practical reason. A little fiction, a few portraits, the least amount of amusement, will suffice to adorn it. This substantial food only needs a very simple seasoning. It is not the novelty of the dishes, nor dainty cookery, but solidity and wholesomeness, which they seek. For this reason the Essays are a national food. It is because they are insipid and dull for us that they suit the taste of an EnglishWe understand now why they take for a favourite the respectable, the unbearable Samuel Johnson.

man.

I would fain bring together all these features, see these figures; only colours and forms complete an idea; to know, we must see. Let us go to the print-room. Hogarth, the national painter, the friend of Fielding, the contemporary of Johnson, the exact imitator of manners, will show us the externals, as these authors have shown us the internals. We enter these great archives of art. Painting is a noble thing! It embellishes all, even vice. On the four walls, under transparent and brilliant glass, the torsos rise, flesh palpitates, the blood's warm dew circulates under the veined skin, speaking likenesses stand out in the light; it seems that the ugly, the vulgar, the odious, have disappeared from the world. I no more criticise characters; I have done with moral rules. I am no longer tempted to approve or to hate. Α man here is but a smudge of colour, at most a handful of muscles; I know no longer if he be a murderer.

Life, the happy, complete, overflowing display, the expansion of natural and corporal powers; this from all sides floods and rejoices our eyes. Our limbs instinctively move by contagious imitation of movements and forms. Before these lions of Rubens, whose deep growls rise like thunder to the mouth of the cave, before these colossal contorting torsos, these snouts which grope about skulls, the animal in us quivers through sympathy, and it seems as if we were about to emit from our chests a roar to equal their own.

What though art has degenerated, even amongst Frenchmen, epigrammatists, the bepowdered abbés of the eighteenth century, it is art still. Beauty is gone, gracefulness remains. These pretty arch faces, these slender waspish waists, these delicate arms buried in a nest of lace, these careless wanderings amongst thickets and warbling fountains, these gallant dreams in a lofty chamber festooned with garlands, all this refined and coquettish society is still charming. The artist, then as always, gathers the flower of things, recks not of the rest.

But Hogarth, what did he mean? who ever saw such a painter? Is he a painter? Others make us wish to see what they represent; he makes us wish not to see it.

Nothing can be more agreeable to paint than a drunken debauch

by night; the jolly, careless faces; the rich light, drowned in shadows which flicker over rumpled garments and weighed-down bodies. With Hogarth, on the other hand, what figures! Wickedness, stupidity, all the vile poison of the vilest human passions, drops and distils from them. One is shaking on his legs as he stands, sick, whilst a hiccup half opens his belching lips; another howls hoarsely, like a wretched cur; another, with bald and broken head, patched up in places, falls forward on his chest, with the smile of a sick idiot. We turn over the leaves of Hogarth's works, and the train of odious or beastly faces appears to be inexhaustible; features distorted or deformed, foreheads lumpy or puffed out with perspiring flesh, hideous grins distended by ferocious laughter: one has had his nose bitten off; the next, one-eyed, squareheaded, spotted over with bleeding warts, whose red face looks redder under the white wig, smokes silently, full of rancour and spleen; another, an old man with a crutch, scarlet and puffed, his chin falling on his breast, gazes with the fixed and starting eyes of a crab. Hogarth shows the beast in man, and worse, the mad and murderous, the feeble or enraged beast. Look at this murderer standing over the body of his butchered mistress, with squinting eyes, distorted mouth, grinding his teeth at the thought of the blood which stains and denounces him; or this ruined gambler, who has torn off his wig and kerchief, and is crying on his knees, with closed teeth, and fist raised against heaven. Look again at this madhouse: the dirty idiot, with muddy face, filthy hair, stained claws, who thinks he is playing on the violin, and has a sheet of music for a cap; the religious madman, who writhes convulsively on his straw, with clasped hands, feeling the claws of the devil in his bowels; the naked and haggard raving lunatic whom they are chaining up, and who is tearing out his flesh with his nails. Detestable Yahoos that you are, who presume to usurp the blessed light, in what brain can you have arisen, and why did a painter sully his eyes with the sight of you?

It is because his eyes were English, and the senses are barbarous. Let us leave our repugnance behind us, and look at things as Englishmen do, not from without, but from within. The whole current of public thought tends here toward observation of the soul, and painting is dragged along with literature in the same course. Forget then the forms, they are but lines; the body is here only to translate the mind.1 This twisted nose, these pimples on a vinous cheek, these stupefied gestures of a drowsy brute, these wrinkled features, these degraded forms, only make the character, the trade, the whim, the habit stand out clear. The artist shows us no longer limbs and heads, but debauchery, drunkenness, brutality, hatred, despair, all the diseases

1 When a character is strongly marked in the living face, it may be considered as an index to the mind, to express which with any degree of justness in painting, requires the utmost efforts of a great master.-Analysis of Beauty.

and deformities of these too harsh and "hard wills, the mad menagerie of all the passions. Not that he lets them loose; this rude, dogmatic, and Christian citizen handles more vigorously than any of his brethren the heavy club of morality. He is a beef-eating policeman charged with instructing and correcting drunken pugilists. From such a man to such men ceremony is superfluous. At the bottom of every cage where he imprisons a vice, he writes its name and adds the condemnation pronounced by Scripture; he displays that vice in its ugliness, buries it in its filth, drags it to its punishment, so that there is no conscience so perverted as not to recognise it, none so hardened as not to be horrified at it.

Look well, these are lessons which have force. This one is against gin: on a step, in the open street, lies a drunken woman, half naked, with hanging breasts, scrofulous legs; she smiles idiotically, and her child, which she lets fall on the pavement, breaks its skull. Beneath, a pale skeleton, with closed eyes, sinks down with her glass in her hand. Round about, dissipation and frenzy drive the tattered spectres one against another. A wretch who has hung himself sways to and fro in a garret. Gravediggers are putting a naked woman into a coffin. A starveling is gnawing side by side with a dog a bone destitute of meat. By his side a young woman is making her suckling swallow gin. A madman pitchforks his child, and raises it aloft; he dances and laughs, and the mother sees it.

Another picture and lesson, this time against cruelty. A young murderer has been hung, and is being dissected. He is there, on a table, and the lecturer calmly points out with his wand the places where the students are to work. At this sign the dissectors cut the flesh and pull. One is at the feet; the second man of science, a sardonic old butcher, seizes a knife with a hand that looks as if it would do its duty, and thrusts the other hand into the entrails, which, lower down, are being taken out to be put in a bucket. The last medical student takes out the eye, and the distorted mouth seems to howl under his hand. Meanwhile a dog seizes the heart, which is dragging on the ground; thigh-bones and skull boil, by way of concert, in a copper; and the doctors around coolly exchange surgical jokes on the subject which, piecemeal, is passing away under their scalpels.

Frenchmen will say that such lessons are good for barbarians, and that they only half-like these official or lay preachers, De Foe, Hogarth, Smollett, Richardson, Johnson, and the rest. I reply that moralists are useful, and that these have changed a state of barbarism into one of civilisation.

CHAPTER VII.

The Poets.

I. Rule and realm of the classical spirit-Its characters, works, scope, and limits -How it is centred in Pope.

II. Pope-Education-Precocity-Beginnings-Pastoral poems-Essay on Criticism-Personal appearance-Mode of life-Character-Mediocrity of his passions and ideas-Largeness of his vanity and talent-Independent fortune and assiduous labour.

III. Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard-What the passions become in artificial poetry -The Rape of the Lock-Society and the language of society in France and England-Wherein Pope's badinage is painful and displeasing-The Dunciad-Obscenity and vulgarities-Wherein the English imagination and drawing-room wit are irreconcilable.

IV. Descriptive talent-Oratorical talent-Didactic poems-Why these poems are the final work of the classical spirit-The Essay on Man-His deism and optimism-Value of his conceptions-How they are connected with the dominant style-How they are deformed in Pope's hands-Methods and perfection of his style-Excellence of his portraits-Why they are superior -Translation of the Iliad-Change of taste during the past century.

V. Incommensurability of the English mind and the classical decorum-Prior— Gay-Ancient pastoral impossible in northern climates-Moral conception natural in England-Thomson.

VI. Discredit of the drawing-room-Entrance of the man of sensations-Why the return to nature is more precocious in England than in France-SterneRichardson-Mackenzie-Macpherson-Gray, Akenside, Beattie, Collins, Young, Shenstone-Persistence of the classical form-Domination of the period-Johnson-The historical school-Robertson, Gibbon, Hume-Their talent and their limits--Beginning of the modern age.

W

I.

HEN we take in in one view the vast literary region in England, extending from the restoration of the Stuarts to the French Revolution, we perceive that all the productions, independently of the English character, bear a classical impress, and that this impress, special to this region, is met with neither in the preceding nor in the succeeding time. This dominant form of thought is imposed on all writers from Waller to Johnson, from Hobbes and Temple to Robertson and Hume: there is an art to which they all aspire; the work of a hundred years, practice and theory, inventions and imitations, examples and criticism, are employed in attaining it. They comprehend only one kind of beauty; they estab

VOL. II.

N

lish only the precepts which may produce it; they re-write, translate, and disfigure on its pattern the great works of other ages; they carry it into all the different kinds of literature, and succeed or fail in them according as it is adapted to them or not. The sway of this style is so absolute, that it is imposed on the greatest, and condemns them to impotence when they would apply it beyond its domain. The possession of this style is so universal, that it is met with in the weakest, and raises them to the height of talent, when they apply it in its domain. This it is which brings to perfection prose, discourse, essay, dissertation, narration, and all the productions which form part of conversation and eloquence. This it is which destroyed the old drama, debased the new, impoverished and diverted poetry, produced a correct, agreeable, sensible, colourless, and concise history. This spirit, common to England and France, impressed its form on the infinite diversity of literary works, so that in its universal manifest ascendency we cannot but recognise the presence of one of those internal forces which bend and govern the course of human genius.

In no branch was it displayed more manifestly than in poetry, and at no time did it appear more clearly than under Queen Anne. The poets have just attained to the art which they had discerned. For sixty years they were approaching it; now they possess it, handle it; already they employ and exaggerate it. The style is at the same time finished and artificial. Open the first that comes to hand, Parnell or Philips, Addison or Prior, av or Tickell, you find a certain turn of mind, versification, language. Pass to a second, the same form reappears; you would say that they were imitations one of another. Go on to a third; the same diction, the same apostrophes, the same fashion of arranging an epithet and rounding a period. Turn over the whole lot; with little individual differences, they seem to be all cast in the same mould; one is more epicurean, another more moral, another more biting; but the noble language, the oratorical pomp, the classical correctness, reign throughout; the substantive is accompanied by its adjective, its knight of honour; antithesis balances the symmetrical architecture; the verb, as in Lucan or Statius, is displayed, flanked on each side by a noun decorated by an epithet; one would say that the verse had been fabricated by a machine, so uniform is the make; we forget what it means; we are tempted to count the feet on our fingers; we know beforehand what poetical ornaments are to embellish it. There is a theatrical dressing, contrasts, allusions, mythological elegances, Greek or Latin quotations. There is a scholastic solidity, sententious maxims, philosophic commonplaces, moral developments, oratorical exactness. You might imagine yourself to be before a family of plants; if the size, colour, accessories, names differ, the

1 P. L. Courier (1772-1825) says, 'a lady's maid, under Louis XIV., wrote better than the greatest of modern writers.'