illustrated. It was the new reading public that could pay by its numbers and released art as well as literature from the more galling yoke of personal patronage. There were few well-to-do English households now that had not a finely illustrated copy of some English classic. And thus was trained not merely the young artistic talent of the country, but the young literary talent; it learned to imagine more vividly and definitely the historical scenes and characters it conjured up and to "body forth the forms of things. unknown," "turn them to shapes ", and The natural consequence was greater picturesqueness in literature and especially in fiction and poetry. Section 6. I. An equally striking effect upon the prose of the period was produced by an art more nearly allied to nature than the literary. English political oratory rose to its greatest height during this period and moulded other kinds of prose as it never did before or again. For special conditions attached to it. The life given to parliamentary institutions by the revolution of 1688 reached its first vigour of youth in the latter half of last century. Party government had at last developed the House of Commons into a national arena, where the best leaders and orators each party could find were pitted against each other. The revolutionism of the age and the reaction against it gave them the heated atmosphere and the passion that make an art great. Even though the elections were still anything but a real test of national sentiment, the debates in the Commons revealed a consciousness of a listening nation. There is a dignity of manner and diction that belongs to the political oratory of no other period. For the right of public meeting was won late in the century and the habit of making great oratorical efforts before the electors had not yet been fostered by the development of journalism and verbatim reporting into a fixed feature of English civilisation. Thus the lower House was the one arena for the oratorical talent of the secular kind. And Chatham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, the greatest names in the history of English political eloquence, were gathered together in it during the last quarter of last century. They had splendid themes in the American and French revolutions and in the subsidiary movements that clustered round these and the new philanthropy. They had all the enthusiasm of the new time. And they had all the illustrative material that the expansion of the empire and of literature supplied. 2. It is not strange, then, that the oratory should react upon literature. And it had exceptional circumstances for such reaction. During the greater part of the period there could be no verbatim reporting of the speeches in parliament and the accounts of them published had for a time to seem fictitious; imaginary names were given to the speakers and even the houses were spoken of in a veiled way. The reporters sent in by the publishers had, therefore, to be men of considerable literary power. And their training in the manipulation, if not transformation, of the speeches they heard had no mean influence upon the prose style of the time. Dr. Johnson was long engaged upon this service to the public; and there is little doubt that the long balanced swing of the Johnsonian period was due to the necessity of polishing into the oratorical form the rough drafts that his or other men's memory bore out of the House. He had already acquired the tendency to rhetoric from Pope and the Queen Anne age. But he developed the regularity of form into the long oratorical period. When he came to write for the public in Rasselas and the Rambler, he was unable to abandon the habit he had thus learned from his professional occupation. His last book,, The Lives of the Poets, though removed farthest by time from this influence, and though freer in style than anything of his but his sayings reported by Boswell, has still much of the old habit; he falls into it as soon as the escape from details and facts allows him to pass into an elaborate judgment or moralisation. 3. And his long dictatorship of the London literary world helped to make it almost a fixed habit of the prose of the period. It matters not to what literary type we turn, there we find the elaborate sentence of balanced clauses and phrases. In Junius we see the public epistolary style take the type of brief debating speeches addressed to a small and educated assembly. History has the same kind of audience to address, if we are to judge by Gibbon's great work; for it is marked by its long and intricate periodic style and condensed rhetoric. Philosophy has the same oratorical tinge, as we can see in the books of Campbell, Beattie, and Burke. Even Goldsmith in his essays, and Horace Walpole and Godwin in their novels occasionally fall into the declamatory style. The very poetry has something of it. Goldsmith and Cowper and Rogers have at times in their poems the periodic or pendulum-like swing of the prose. 4. Nor was the oratory that thus moulded the literature of the time of a popular kind, like much that is political in our own century. It had ever in view the great classical orators, Demosthenes and Cicero ; and indulged often in a long classical quotation, and constantly in highly Latinised diction. Although in sentiment it might address the nation, it kept before it as its ideal of form an address to a small, aristocratic, and highly educated audience. It assumed great dignity of tone even when it was stabbing to the heart or torturing by keen irony or personal attack. It had none of the didacticism or direct appeal to the emotions that pulpit eloquence had adopted. Through the oratory of the sermon rhetoric had already entered into English prose during all periods. But it was essentially different from that which came from the House of Commons. It was more given to subtlety of thought and quaint illustration and more guided by the desire to teach. Even forensic eloquence was different; it was more eager to persuade either the subtle or scholarly mind of a judge or the loosejointed thinking powers of a jury. The oratory of the parliamentary rostrum was rather marked by a passion to state situations clearly and to bring the best historical light to bear on them than to persuade or convert. Arguments for a political creed, winged by fervid appeal to the past or to the broad sense of humanity, filled the speeches of Burke and Chatham and Fox. 5. And it was this type of oratory that so long affected written prose during the latter half of last century. There were many indications of the revolt of prose from the Latinised rhetoric that had fixed its yoke upon it almost from the age of Chaucer; and this regularity and balance of construction that the new oratory gave it was one of its first aids towards a better and more natural style. But the two literary phenomena that were to emancipate it completely from the yoke of oratory were the growth of the novel and the return of poetry to nature. Fiction, in having to address the new reading public, had to draw from the more Saxon fountains of English that persisted in the language of the Authorised Version and the Pilgrim's Progress and in the language of conversation, and by its gradual incorporation of the didactic purposes of prose soon spread its influence widely over all other departments of writing. Poetry in throwing off the yoke of London society and appealing to the native instincts of the English people had to find a more natural type of expression than had been handed down from the age of Queen Anne; the popular ballads and songs suggested the true sources of diction; and it rejected the Latinised phraseology and the conventional forms that so long had cramped it; the simple language of the everyday life of the people was now preferred and that was largely tinged with the archaisms of the folk literature, the Bible, and the ballads. But this movement did not affect the diction of prose much till almost the beginning of the nineteenth century. Section 7. I. And it is not surprising that oratory held such an absolute sway over written prose during our period. For it was a period of great individualities, all over the civilised world, and these moved in the world of politics, especially in England. It is seldom that four such powerful characters as Chatham, Pitt, Burke, and Fox have been gathered together into one generation of the House of Commons. Whilst Johnson and Gibbon, two other striking individualities, one by his occupation as reporter of the speeches and the other by his interest and ultimate appearance in the LIBRARY OF THE OF CALCHOR FERISTICS AND INFLUENCES 55 House, assumed oratorical prose as the most natural expression of their thoughts. Such influences could not fail to keep style enslaved to oratory. And as we read the Letters of Junius we feel that they are addressed to the nation through the Commons. 2. This latter part of the eighteenth century indeed was marked like the Elizabethan era by the number of powerful individualities that appeared. What century could show such a record of greatness? Frederick the Great, Catherine of Russia, Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, Washington, Mirabeau, have each of them a character that would have made any age notable. It was the revolutionism of the time that called them out and gave them missions that made them famous. Europe seethed with the rising tempest; and the new ideas naturally singled out exceptional force of character or will or mind either as their representatives or as reactionaries against them. The whole of civilisation was alive with threatening change and exceptional power was needed to give it issue and definite form. Hence from all spheres came wills and characters that could mould and impress; and the very atmosphere of passion that surrounded them made them stronger in individuality. But it is the misfortune of such a time that politics and war draw off its genius from the arts and literature, though these alone could give it a form that would live as a personal influence over all ages. History alone gives us any record of their greatness, and but for it they would become a name. And apart from the revolutionism that produced them or called them forth, they cannot be said to have much more than a negative influence on the literature of the age. Their success stirs the talent of each nation to political and warlike ambition and only those, who are incapacitated for such public pursuits by weakness of health or timidity of disposition, prefer the gentler arts. Perhaps their careers quicken the blood in the veins of writers and stir them to seek heroic ages for their themes. Ossian and Chatterton's poems and the romances of the last quarter of the century are, perhaps, partly the outcome of such a stimulus. So too perhaps is the great development of historical literature that marks the period. Men who saw great history making |