the humor and variety of Addison's and Steele's, so that Rambler and Idler are little more than names; his allegorical romance, Rasselas, has pathetic interest when we reflect that he wrote it when his heart was torn with anguish, in order to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral, but we do not know and love the work itself as we know and love Bunyan's allegory; and even his Lives of the Poets, the most considerable of his writings, is read today, not for the biographies which it contains, but for its record of the opinions of Samuel Johnson on literature and life. Greater than any book that he made is the book that was made about him by his disciple

JAMES BOSWELL

James Boswell, a great book because it is an intimate revelation of the life of a very great man.

The story of Johnson's life is as fascinating as a romance. The best introduction to that story is the famous essay by Macaulay, in which an orderly account is given of the experiences and the writings of the man, written with the brilliancy that marks Macaulay's power to make the history of a period or of a great man a part of the experience of his readers. After that, Boswell's Life, which has been called the greatest biography in our literature, may be read wholly or in part in order to fill in the picture with the bits of

conversation, the character sketches of Johnson and his friends, and the wealth of anecdote that Macaulay's brief account could not give.

These two biographies show that the secret of Johnson's power lay in his personality. He was not in sympathy with liberalism in politics, with the development of democracy, nor, indeed, with anything that savored of romanticism. His literary standards were those of the age of Pope: he liked correctness, the couplet, and proper moral sentiments. He expressed himself with vigor and made no secret of his violent prejudices. But while he loved argument, he loved his friends more. The last thirty years of his life, after the poverty that had followed him from his youth had been removed by the income from his writings and a government pension, he devoted largely to conversations with his friends at the Club. Among the men who gathered there were Boswell, Goldsmith, the historian Gibbon, the orator and statesman Burke, the great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and others equally famous for their achievements in a variety of fields. They were all good talkers, but Johnson held the primacy in an assembly of kings. The brilliancy of the conversation at these gatherings called forth his best powers. Alone, or with his pen in hand, he was often morose, lethargic, unable to force himself to work; but at these intellectual tennis matches he became alive, dropped his ponderous literary vocabulary, and said things so filled with character and common sense that they constitute his unique claim to distinction. Through this means he was a power in his own time; through the records kept by Boswell he is still a living figure.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). Although Goldsmith wrote heroic couplets, moralized in prose and verse, based his criticism of contemporary literature on pseudo-classic rules, and hated the romantic literature of earlier days, he was at heart and in his life an incurable romanticist. He was born in Ireland and educated at Dublin University. Even as a boy he showed the traits that endeared him to Johnson and the other members of the Club: his

indisposition to hard work his fondness for a practical joke, even on himself, his misplaced generosity, and his ability to get into scrapes from which he extricated himself by his wits. He tried various professions without success, the funds for his experiments being supplied by a benevolent uncle. This uncle finally sent him abroad to study medicine, but Goldsmith spent in a freak of generosity the money that had been advanced for his expenses, and gave up his studies to wander about Europe with no other source of income than his wits. An incident that happened to him in his boyhood suggested the plot of She Stoops to Conquer, his most famous comedy, and his experiences as a vagabond inspired some passages in his poem, The Traveller, and his novel, The Vicar of Wakefield. After his return from his wanderings he tried teaching, with no greater success than his attempts at law and medicine had brought him, and after a time found himself in London, where he earned a little money through various odd jobs as a hack writer. He lived in poverty, for if he earned any money he was pretty sure to give it to the first needy person who crossed his path. Finally, one day, Dr. Johnson came upon him, a prisoner to his landlady for non-payment of his rent. On his table was the manuscript of his Vicar of Wakefield, which Johnson read with delight and sold to a publisher. From that time on the two men were great friends, and some of the finest wit combats staged at the Club were between the great doctor, who brought all his heavy artillery into action, and the lighter-armed "Noll." For a record of these occasions, and for a very full portrait of Goldsmith's character and opinions, Boswell's Life of Johnson is our best

source.

Goldsmith made some very distinctive contributions to literature. His chief poems are The Traveller and The Deserted Village, both of them written in the heroic couplet but differing in many ways from the work of Pope. The Deserted Village is one of the best-known poems in the language, partly because of the ease and grace of its verse, and more because of the portraits that it gives of the village

schoolmaster and the parson, and its sympathy for rural life. The portraits have often been compared with Chaucer's, and indeed the two men, though far removed in point of time, have in common a love for nature and for types of character found in humble life, while both have rare power of portraiture and a kindly humor that enable them to characterize accurately but with sympathy. Even more important are Goldsmith's contributions to comedy and to prose fiction. The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) has no great originality of plot, but it tells a story of a clergyman's family with a simplicity and charm that have endeared it to generations of readers and made it one of the best-loved books in the world. In his comedies, The GoodNatured Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773), he sought to rescue comedy from the sentimentality into which it had fallen and to restore humorous characters and situations to the stage.

Other Members of Johnson's Circle. Attention has already been called to the fact that the Club was made up of men distinguished in various fields of life. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who seems to have been the first to suggest that the chance meetings of a few friends might prove more interesting if given an informal organization, was one of the most faithful of

Johnson's admirers. He won great fame for his work as a painter, his special field being the painting of portraits. He also wrote a series of discourses on art. Edward Gibbon wrote, in the period between 1776 and 1778, his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. No history had been previously written in England on such a vast scale and with the solid foundation of such great learning. David Garrick has already been mentioned as a member of the Club. He was famous for the style of acting that he introduced. Instead of the cold and stilted manner of the times, in which dramatic speeches were given as though they were specimens of elocution, he played Hamlet, Macbeth, and other Shakespearean rôles with an intensity and fire that moved his audiences to the depths. He was also a great theatrical manager, and his company included such famous actresses as Mrs. Cibber and Peg Woffington.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE

ENGLISH NOVEL

The modern English novel dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. Prose fiction had been popular in England since the time of Elizabeth, but plots were badly managed, characters were not clearly drawn, and the technique of managing dialogue, narration of incidents by the author, and description, was more slowly mastered than the technique of the drama. Thus, Lyly in his Euphues has a very slight plot, conceals it pretty thoroughly with his essay-like comments, and knows nothing about making his characters stand forth as real personalities. Sidney's plot in Arcadia is over-elaborate, hard to follow, and almost entirely divorced from reality. Bunyan's plot is admirable in every respect, and his characters, though types, are convincing, but he has no love-story, an almost universal element in the plots of modern novels.

We have already noted some features of eighteenth century prose that were to contribute to the development of modern prose fiction. Addison and Steele discovered the interest to be found in minute portrayal of character through description. They have realism; what they lack is plot. Defoe in

Robinson Crusoe, and Swift in Gulliver's Travels, told realistic stories, or stories that seemed realistic, without the analysis of emotions and the love motive that their successors were to use. Most of all, perhaps, the sense of fact, the interest in the relations of men and women living in a civilized society, prepared the way for the novelists that were to come. In Richardson and Fielding, who wrote near the middle of the century, we find prose fiction that approximates the technique of modern novelists and appeals to the tastes of modern readers.

The

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). first modern novel came about by the merest accident. Its author was Samuel Richardson, a London printer, who was past fifty before he became an author. He had for some time been interested in young people of the middle class. He had written letters for love-lorn lads and lassies, sometimes supplying the model love letters for both the youth and the maid in the same affair. One day it occurred to him to tell a love story by means of letters. Pamela (1740) was the result. The heroine was a servant in a wealthy family. The young man of the house made love to her, but to marry her seemed out of the question on account of the differences in social rank. At length, after many trials, love triumphed and virtue was rewarded.

The merit of this book consists in its searching analysis of character, a plot that avoids the succession of unrelated episodes characteristic of medieval love romance, and a careful arrangement of details so that the story has dramatic unity and climax. The long letters lay bare in the most intimate way the thoughts of the chief characters. There are many moral reflections, and these had great effect on the readers of the story. It is very sentimental, but while people professed to admire the severe classical standards set forth by Pope and his fellows, many of them secretly longed for sentiment, and Richardson supplied sentiment without stint.

Richardson wrote two other very long novels. In the first of these, Clarissa Harlowe, the story is somewhat like that

of Pamela, but the end is tragic. The plot is splendidly managed; each event, each change in the fortunes of the characters, is carefully prepared for and contributes to the slow but inevitable movement toward the tragic conclusion. In Sir Charles Grandison he set forth the virtues of the perfect gentleman, but his gentleman is so perfect that he is a tiresome prig. The author excelled in the delineation of female character, and he was rewarded by the adulation of a great feminine audience. Letters poured in upon him from all parts of England and, later, from the continent. When Clarissa Harlowe was appearing, in parts, people could hardly wait for the next installment; they besought him not to let Clarissa die. In some families it was the custom, when a new section of the story appeared, for someone to read aloud the chapter. At affecting places in the narrative the reading would be interrupted until the members of the group could go to their rooms and weep, and, having composed themselves, return to resume the story. Pilgrimages were made by enthusiastic devotees to interview the wonderful genius who had so mastered the secrets of the human heart.

We know little of his education and early life, but as a young man he wrote playssome of them burlesques that amused contemporary audiences-for London theaters; for a time he was a theatrical manager, and he also studied and practiced law and wrote for the periodicals.

The accident that disclosed to Fielding his true genius was his disgust when he read Pamela. He regarded its sentimentality as immoral, and on a sudden impulse resolved to show its silliness by writing a parody. In his Joseph Andrews (1742), his hero is the virtuous brother of the virtuous Pamela. To escape the attentions of his mistress he takes to flight. At this point Fielding became so much interested in his story that he forgot all about parodying Richardson and proceeded to write a story of adventure, influenced by Cervantes and the stories of roguery that had been popular in former times. Much of the story is pure farce, but in Parson Adams we find one of the great characters of fiction.

Jonathan Wild, published in 1743, was written to show that greatness does not necessarily involve goodness. From it Fielding turned to writing for the newspapers, but he was meditating, perhaps writing, his greatest novel, Tom Jones, which appeared in 1749. His last novel, Amelia, was published in 1751.

Tom Jones is a perfect illustration of the comic epic in prose. It contains numerous digressions in the form of little essays on literary topics, some of them setting forth his theory of his art, and written in delightfully informal style. He gains verisimilitude, as Defoe had done before him, through insisting that his narrative is a true history. That he still sought to ridicule Richardson's sentimentality is shown by the fact that he gives his hero the very unromantic name of Tom Jones. Richardson, in turn, responding to the cries of his feminine admirers that Fielding's story was coarse and low, said that he viewed with alarm the "Evil Tendency" of such writing and proceeded to give, in Sir Charles Grandison, the character of a truly perfect gentleman. And in place of Fielding's Sophia, we find Richardson's Signorina Clementina della Porretta.