With the work of these four novelists, whose best thoughts were given to fiction, were associated two or three isolated contributions to the novel, among which the Vicar of Wakefield and Rasselas are the most celebrated. Neither Johnson nor Goldsmith, however, would have adopted this form, if a direct and highly successful appeal to the public had not already been made by Richardson and Fielding. These masterly books were episodic; they have little importance in our general survey. Nor must we delay to describe the Peter Wilkins (1751) of Robert Paltock, with its beautiful

Illustration from Robert Paltock's " Peter Wilkins "

dream of a winged race of Glums and Gawries, nor the eccentric Socinian romance of John Bunde, 1756-66, of Thomas Amory, although each of these, in its isolated way, is a minor classic. We judge them as we judge the flood of novels which presently rushed forth in all the languages of Europe, as being the results of a discovery which the world owes to the great English pioneers. The novel, indeed, was the first gift of a prominent kind which the world owed to England. The French boudoir romance, as exemplified by Crebillon Jils, faded out of existence when Richardson rose over the Continent. The lucidity, directness, and wholesomeness of this new species of fiction made a way for it at once; within a marvellously short space of time all Europe was raving over Pamela and Clarissa. The anti

romantic novel swept heroic and picaresque fiction out of the field, and it was the uncommon good fortune of the humdrum old printer to prepare the way for Rousseau and Goethe, to be imitated by Voltaire, and to win the enthusiastic adulation of Diderot and of Marmontel, who preferred Sir Charles Grandison to all the masterpieces of antiquity. The type of novel invented in England about 1740-50 continued for sixty or seventy years to be the only model for Continental fiction ; and criticism has traced on every French novelist, in particular, the stamp of Richardson, if not of Sterne and

Fielding, while the Anglomania of Rousseau is patent to the superficial reader.

The literature which exercised so wide an influence, and added so greatlyto the prestige and vital force of English manners of thought, is not to be disregarded as trivial. The introduction of the novel, indeed, was to intellectual life as epoch-making as the invention of railways was to social life: it added a vast and inexhaustibly rich province to the domain of the imagination. The discovery that a chronicle of events which never happened to people who never existed, may be made, not merely as interesting and probable, but practically as true as any record of historical adventure, was one of most far-reaching importance. It was what Fielding called " the prosai-comi-epos " of the age, invented for the ceaseless delight of those who had tasted the new pleasure of seeing themselves as others saw them. The realistic novel was as popular as a bit of looking-glass is among savages. It enabled our delighted forefathers to see what manner of men they were, painted without dazzling or " sub-fusc " hues, in the natural colours of life. For us the pathos of Richardson, the sturdy, manly sense of Fielding, the sensibility of Sterne, the unaffected humanity of Goldsmith, possess a perennial charm, but they cannot be to us quite what they were to those most enviable readers who not merely perused them for the first time, but had never conceived the possibility of seeing anything like them. That fresh eagerness we never can recover.

Samuel Johnson Ajter a Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds

The complex age illustrated by such poets as Young, and such novelists as Fielding, found its fullest personal exponent in Dr. Samuel Johnson, not the greatest writer, indeed, in English literature, but perhaps the most massive figure of a man of letters. The gradual tendency of the century had more and more come to be concentrated upon attention to common sense, and in Johnson a character was developed, of noble intelligence, of true and tender heart, of lambent humour, in whose entire philosophy every impulse was subordinated to that negative virtue. Johnson became, therefore, the leading intellect of the country, because displaying in its quintessence the quality most characteristic of the majority of educated -men and women. Common sense gave point to his wit, balance to his morality, a Tory limitation to his intellectual sympathy. He keeps the central path; he is as little indulgent to enthusiasm as to infidelity; he finds as little place in his life for mysticism as for coarse frivolity. Vitafumus, and it is not for man to waste his years in trying to weigh the smoke or puff it away; bravely and simply he must labour and acquiesce, without revolt, without speculation, in "all that human hearts endure." This virile hold upon facts, this attitude to conduct as a plain garment from which the last slired of the Shaftesbury gold-lace optimism had been torn, explains the astounding influence Johnson wielded during his lifetime. His contemporaries knew him to be thoroughly honest, profoundly intelligent, and yet permeated by every prejudice of the age. They loved to deal with facts, and no man had so large a stock of them at his disposal as Johnson.

For nearly fifty years Johnson was occupied in literary composition. Yet his books are not so voluminous as such a statement would lead us to expect. It is doubtful whether, with a competency, Johnson would have written at all, for he was ponderously indolent, moving slowly, and easily persuaded to stop, loving much more to read, to ponder, and to talk than to write, and, indeed, during long periods of his career unable to put pen to paper. Of his

Samuel Johnson

Ajler a Portrait by Sir Joshua Keyt

lids

principal productions the most famous may be called occasional, for they were written suddenly, under a pressing need for money, in a jet of violent energy which was succeeded by prolonged inertia. He essayed every species of composition, and it cannot be said that he was unsuccessful in any, according to the estimate of the age. His two poems, satires imitated from

Juvenal, are less " poetical," perhaps, in the recent sense than any writings of their reputation in the language, but the solidity and sententiousness of their couplets kept them moderately popular for more than half a century. As an essayist, it is less fair to judge Johnson by his Ramblers than by his lighter and less pompous Idlers; yet even the former were till lately habitually read. He lent his dignified and ponderous imagination to the task of producing fiction, and Rasselas takes its place among the minor classics of our tongue. Towards the end of his life Johnson came forward four times with a weighty pamphlet as completely outside the range of practical politics as those of Carlyle. He is also the writer of two diaries of travel, of sermons, of a tragedy, of certain critical ana—all of them, in the strict sense, occasional, and almost unprofessional.

The only works on which Johnson can be said to have expended elaborate attention are his Dictionary, which scarcely belongs to literature, and his Lives of the English Poets. The latter, indeed, is his magnum opus; on it, and on it alone, if we except his reported sayings, the reputation of Johnson as a critic rests. This extremely delightful compendium can never cease to please a certain class of readers, those, namely, who desire intellectual stimulus rather than information, and who can endure the

Temple Lane

dogmatic expression of an opinion with which they disagree. No one turns to Johnson's pages any longer to know what to think about Milton or Gray; no one any longer considers that Cowley was the first correct English poet, or that Edmund Smith was a great man. Half Johnson's selected poets are read no longer, even by students ; many of them never were read at all. Mrs. Browning wittily remarked that " Dr. Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets,—and left the poets out." What we seek in these delightful volumes is the entertainment to be obtained from the courageous exposition, the gay, bold decisiveness, the humour and humanity of the prodigious critic, self-revealed in his preferences and his prejudices. There are no " perhaps's"and"Ithink's"; all is peremptory and assertive ; you take the judgment or you leave it, and if you venture to make a reservation, the big voice roars you down. This remarkable publication closes the criticism of the century; it is the final word of the movement which had been proceeding since 1660; it sums it up so brilliantly and authoritatively that immediate revolt from its principles was a matter of course. During the very same years Thomas Warton was publishing his History of English Poetry, in which all the features were found which Johnson lacked—broad and liberal study, an enthusiasm for romance, a sense of something above and beyond the rules of the critics, a breadth of real poetry undreamed of by Johnson. Warton knew his subject; Johnson did not. Warton prophesied of a dawning age, and Johnson stiffly contented himself with the old. Warton was accurate, painstaking, copious ; Johnson was careless, indolent, inaccurate; yet, unfair as it seems, to-day everybody still reads Johnson, and no one opens the pages of Warton.

Johnson's House in Bolt Court, Fleet Street