Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/448

Rh 428 ENGLISH L I T E II A T U K E [GEORGIAN. haps entirely different in kind from those which existed in the mind of God. It is obvious that the Supreme Being of the Characteristics, in whose eyes the excesses of the Reign of Terror would be merely a hurricane purifying the moral atmosphere, and who would see &quot;with equal eye&quot; &quot; A heio perish or a sparrow fall &quot; has little in common with the Gocl of the New Testament, whose absolute rejection of iniquity is the very basis on which revealed religion is built, and in whose eyes the least of his reasonable creatures is &quot; of more value than many sparrows.&quot; This dissonance between Christianity and his own system was evident to Shaftesbury himself, and led him to speak disrespectfully of the former in various places of his writings. He is accordingly classed by Leland among deistical writers. Pope, less clear sighted, would not admit that the philosophy of the Essay on Man (which is precisely the same as that of Shaftesbury) AVas in any way repugnant to Christianity ; and Warburton argued laboriously on the same side. Nevertheless, in his Universal Prayer, Pope implicitly retracted the main tenet of the longer poem ; and posterity has held that Crousaz, the assailant of the Essay, understood its real bearing better than Warburton its defender Berke- Disturbed at the thought of the predominance which ley. the spread of Locke s sensationalist philosophy might be expected to give to the material interests of man, yet not choosing to revert to any of the old systems which let in the principle of authority, Berkeley conceived the strange idea of denying the validity of the inferences made by every perceiving mind concerning the objects perceived. He denied the existence of matter, or material substance, which is merely the name given by philosophers to the &quot;something&quot; which underlies and supports the sensible qualities of an object. The objects themselves, he admitted, are real ; the ideas which the mind forms concerning them are also real; moreover, these ideas constitute for man the sole road to the knowledge of the objects. Instead of holding with Locke that the objects, by the impressions which they make on ths senses, engender ideas, he held that the ideas implanted by the Creator in the human mind teach it all that it can possibly know about the objects. This ideal philosophy, having a merely subjective base growing neither out of tradition nor experience might obviously be twisted to the vindication of any system of opinions what ever. Hume, therefore, as we shall see in the next section, had not much difficulty in reducing iaddbsurdum, by de veloping further the sceptical theory from which it started. In France and Spain, Lesage and Lazarillo de Tonnes had already won laurels by writing humoraus tales of fiction Defoe, in prose. Defoe, with us, was the first of a series in which he has had so many brilliant successors, by com posing Robinson Crusoe (1719). Many other fictitious tales, in all which he aimed at the appearance of being a truthful narrator of facts, followed from the same facile pen. But in the texture of thess, as in the mind that produced them, there was something coarse and homely ; they could not supplant for refined readers the high flown romances of France. That was reserved for the sentimental novels of Richardson; similia similibus curantui: IX. The Triumph of Compromise, 1729-1789. In the early part of this period, Pope, who died in 1744, was still the great literary force ; for most of the remainder of it, that honour belonged to Samuel Johnson. Nothing can more strongly demonstrate the vitality of the political prin ciples which triumphed at the Revolution than the fact that both these great men, though in secret they abhorred the compromise, had no choice but to acquiesce in it. Pope, whose grounds of dislike were both religious and political, indemnified himself for his acquiescence by many a scornful gibe and bitter sarcasm levelled at the German family which had seated itself on the Stuart throne. Witness the mock ing adulation of the opening lines of the epistle to Augustus (George II.), or the scathing satire with which he pursued the memory of Queen Caroline both in the Dunciad and the EpUogue to the Satires, though he knew, and even admitted in a note, that that princess in her last moments &quot; manifested the utmost courage and resolution.&quot; Johnson, whose objection to the compromise was almost wholly political, was an arrant Jacobite in feeling to the end of his days. One of his earliest productions, the Marmor N orfolciense, is a clever and cutting Jacobite squib. Allu sions in his satire of London (1738) show the same political colour, and probably had much to do with the sympathizing approval which Pope expressed for the unknown poet, who, he said, would soon be deterre. And although, after he had accepted a pension from George III., he could not decently, as he smilingly admitted to Boswell, &quot; drink King James s health in the wine that King George gave him the money to pay for,&quot; yet the old feeling lurked in his mind, and found violent expression in a recorded conversa tion as late as 1777. &quot; He had this evening a violent argument with Dr Taylor as to the inclinations of the people of England at this time towards the royal family of Stuart. He grew so outrageous as to say that, if England were fairly polled, the present king would be sent away to-night, and his adherents hanged to-morrow. &quot; But, in general, the compromise met with inward no less than outward assent on the part of all the leading minds of the nation, literary men and divines equally with statesmen. For the first part of the period, the resolute common sense of &quot;Walpole, and the moderate churchmanship of Warburton, accurately represented the English mind. The defect of a compromise is, as was said in the last section, that it does not kindle enthusiasm ; under it politics and politicians are apt to grow dull and vapid. Such a state of things pre vailed at the time of the rising of 1745, when the young Pretender was not very far from succeeding, from sheer inertness on the part of those concerned in upholding the Revolution settlement. Soon afterwards there was a change. Young men grew up, before whose eyes floated visions of an expanding empire ; the rapid advance of the American colonies, the success of Englishmen in India, on both which fields France was then our rival, stimulated the genius of the elder Pitt, and furnished themes for the eloquence of Burke. Then the value of those principles of political liberty which had been consolidated at the Revolution came to be understood. Through these Pitt achieved in the Seven Years War his memorable triumph over the abso lute monarchies of France and Spain ; and at the Peace of Paris (1763) England stood at the greatest height of national glory which is recorded in her history. Yet the brilliant scene was soon overcast. A Toryism without ideas,, which was but in fact the portion of Revolution- Whiggism which refused to move with the times, aided by the personal influence of a narrow-minded, illiberal king, got possession of the administration, and immediately everything went wrong. The American war succeeded, and neither the authority of Chatham nor the enlightenment of Burke and Wyndham could prevent its ending in disaster. Soon after the Peace of Versailles the younger Pitt, then a sincere Whig, came into power. He applied himself with great skill and industry to the work of binding firmly together that inheritance of empire, still sufficiently ample, which the peace had left us, when in the middle of his task he was suddenly confronted by the portentous outbreak of the French revolution. This period witnessed the foundation of the science of political economy by Adam Smith, whose memorable