Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/451

Rh 1729-1789.] ENGLISH LITERATURE 431 &quot; Honour forbids me : yet honour bids me; yet I cannot be unjust, ungenerous, selfish ! &quot; is a delicious morceau which can never fail to captivate, and fill with attendrisse- ment, souls of sensibility. After Piichardson and Fielding ollett. came Smollett, with his Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker, novels of coarser mould, and Sterne with Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey, As works of humour, which contain also several admirable and minutely drawn pictures of character, the two last-named works, or at any rue. rate Tristram Shandy, stand alone in our literature ; but they are not in the proper sense of the term novels. It is interesting to note that Sheridan borrowed some of his most popular characters from the novelists; Charles and Joseph Surface are evident copies of Tom Jones and Blifil ; while Tabitha Bramble and Sir Ulic Mack ill igut are no less manifestly the originals of Mrs Malaprop and Sir Lucius OTrigger. These are not the only resemblances ; in fact Humphrey Clinker is the mine out of which Sheridan dug The Rivals. Nothing was more common, in the drama of the Elizabethan age, than for the play-wrights to take their plots from novels. But in the present case we note a difference in the mode of procedure, which is a marked tes timony to the increased relative importance of the novel. The Elizabethan dramatists borrowed only names and incidents ; they created their characters. The Georgian dramatists often borrowed their characters ready made from the pages of the novels, now glowing with a warmer life and richer colouring than their own. To the novels already mentioned Goldsmith s Vicar of Wake field (1766) must be added, the book which first drew Goethe s attention to English literature, and disclosed the hitherto unsuspected idyllic side of the existence of the good Protestant village pastor. To pass over inferior writers (Frances Burney, Henry Mackenzie, &c.), enough has been said to show that England, after the middle of the 18th century, obtained a school of novel-writers of her own, and shook herself free from the trammels alike of French classicism and French romanticism ; nor have the able writers who then came into prominence ever wanted worthy successors down to the presarit day. itory. The luminous intellect of Voltaire had, in the Essai sur les Moeurs, cast a fresh light on history, which was soon reflected in the writings of English students in this field. O O In the preface to the Essai, Voltaire said that the question was no longer to inform the world &quot; in what year a prince who did not deserve to be remembered succeeded another barbarian like himself, in the midst of a rude nnd coarse nation.&quot; Henceforth it would be the business of a historian to seek out, amidst the throng of recorded events, &quot; that which deserves to be known by us, the spirit, the manners, the usages of the principal nations.&quot; Not believ ing in Christianity, and looking to intellectual and literary culture as the great means of human progress, Voltaire naturally regarded the history of the first ten centuries of our era as &quot; no more deserving of being known than the history of the wolves and the bears ; &quot; feudalism and the Middle Ages filled him with disgust; it was only when he came to the Renaissance, with its revival of learning, its tolerance of theological differences, and its love of polish, that he seemed to find anything worth writing a history une. about. Hume, composing a History of England (17 54) under the influence of ideas not very dissimilar to those of Voltaire, and commencing with the Stuart period, was not likely to write favourably of the Puritans, who were neither tolerant nor polished. His work accordingly gave much offence to the Whig party, which had inherited the political tradi tions of Puritanism. Robertson s historical pictures, of Scotland, of Charles V., and of the settlement of America, did not, except incidentally, go back beyond the period of the Renaissance ; the actions of men who lived before that age seemed to him scarcely on a par with the &quot; dignity of history.&quot; Gibbon s great work, the Decline and Fall of Gibbon. the Roman Empire, is designed to trace the gradual political debilitation of the empire, and the extinction of letters and arts through the ravages of the barbarians ; thence passing with a firm and vigorous step through the long night of bar barism he dilates with eloquence aud delight on the story of the rekindling of the flame of learning, and the renewed ap preciation of beauty and refinement, which characterized the Italian Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries. We see that the historians of the 18th century, our own among the number, regarded the early and middle ages of our era as the province of the antiquary and the annalist rather than the historian proper, who, if he dealt with them at all, should despatch them in brief summaries, in which, assum ing an air of great superiority, he should try the men of the 9th or any other early century by the prevalent ideas of the eighteenth. Obviously, in the age in which we live, we have &quot;changed all that;&quot; the age of the Renaissance no longer presents itself to our eyes with such an over powering lustre ; and research into the motives and cast of thought of a Charlemagne or a Henry II. seems to us no longer beneath the &quot; dignity of history.&quot; In theology, one very remarkable work belongs to this Butler, period, Butler s Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736). This is an apologetic work, and may perhaps be regarded as the last word in the deistical controversy. Butler, whose caution and fairness of mind are truly admirable, and who does not pretend that the inquiry which he institutes leads to more than probable conclusions, argues in this work that it is just as difficult to believe nature to have proceeded from and to be ruled by God, as to admit that Christianity has a divine origin. This line of reasoning, though cogent as against the deists, most of whom admitted a divine author of nature, is obviously insufficient to meet the scepticism of the present day, which, embracing the theory of evolution, either rejects the belief in a First Cause altogether, or declines to examine it, as lying beyond the scope of the human faculties. The Sermons of Bishop Butler, in which he established against Hobbes the fact of the existence in the human mind of disinterested affections and dispositions pointing to the good of others, belongs Tather to the depart ment of philosophy than that of theology, The philosophical speculations of this period may be Philo- described as a series of oscillations round Locke s Essay of sopliy the Human Understanding, Hume taking Locke s prin- ciples,and turning them into a theory of scepticism; Hutche- son starting the theory of a new &quot;sense&quot; never dreamed of before, the moral sense ; Hartley and Priestley developing Locke s sensationalism into materialism ; while the Scotch school (Reid, Beattie, Dugald Stewart), recoiling from the consequences of Locke s system, attempted to smuggle &quot; innate ideas &quot; back into philosophy under the names of &quot; common sense,&quot; &quot; instinctive judgments,&quot; &quot; irresistible beliefs,&quot; and so forth. Such brief examination of these writers as our limits allow will make our meaning clearer. Locke s system, says Dugald Stewart, 1 in making sensa tion and reflection the sources of all our simple ideas, led him &quot; to some dangerous opinions concerning the nature of moral distinctions, which he seems to have considered as the offspring of education and fashion.&quot; How Berkeley combated the tendencies of Locke s principles we have already seen. Hutcheson, an Irishman of great acuteness, ITutche- who was appointed to a philosophical chair at Glasgow in son. 1729, unwilling to admit that our moral ideas had no other ultimate source than sensation, yet wishing to conform as much as possible to Locke s terminology, referred the 1 Outlines of Moral Philosophy, ed. by M Cosh, p. 49.