THE MEN OF QUEEN ANNE

THE eighteenth century is the goodly garret of the modern house of life. It has about it the pleasant atmosphere of the attic the aroma of antique silks and brocades, of high-heeled slippers and silver buckles, of powdered wigs and patches, of jeweled fans and gold snuff-boxes, of lace ruffles and cockades, of small-clothes and farthingales, of all the heirlooms, in fact, which have come down from the days of sedan chairs and stage coaches, link boys and sleepy watchmen, artificial grottoes and box-bush swans, red-coated squires and baying hounds, tea tables and coffee houses, and Whigs and Tories and election riots. It is the earliest period, indeed,. to which we may retire and yet retain the sense of kinship.

This is primarily because the eighteenth century marked the ascendancy to power in virtually every phase of national life - political, economic, social, and intellectual of that aspiring middle class which determined the character and activities of nineteenth century society. The literature of the early eighteenth century the age of Anne still addresses itself in part to the declining cavalier class; the literature of the middle and late eighteenth century the age of Johnson - frankly seeks its audience in the bourgeoisie.

The wits of the earlier period - Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift - each made his own contribution to the liberation of middle class society. Pope aimed to present society with a rational and practical philosophy - superficially optimistic - such as merchants and men of practical affairs would understand and accept. Addison and Steele taught this new society to be urbane, gentle, tolerant, and catholic in its tastes and interests. Swift, on the other hand, cynic and misanthrope though he was, and madly elated at his supposed drawing of the meanness of human nature, yet forced society to self-analysis and criticism when he confronted it with disgusting pictures of its own littleness and stupidity.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) described himself as follows: "a lively little creature, with long legs and arms, a spider is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill." Scarcely four feet and a half in height, laced into a canvas bodice to hold his rickety frame in place, his spindle shanks vainly enforced with three pairs of stockings, and his bright eyes peering out of a sharp-featured, pinched little face, he seems the very incarnation of those impish grotesques which adorn the Gothic cathedrals. No one, however, would have resented the association of his name with things medieval more than Pope himself, for he was the most complete exponent of an age which prided itself upon its restrained taste, its rational thinking, good judgment and common sense, and its complete liberation from scholasticism and all its works.

For thirty years Pope was without a serious rival among English poets, and so supreme was his position that the first half of the eighteenth century is commonly known among literary historians as The Age of Pope. Yet his writing is practically confined to two forms, satire and didactic verse, the only forms compatible with a society so selfcontained and critical. Keenness of wit and pure and felicitous phrasing are the distinguishing excellencies of his poetry.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was the greatest satirist that England has produced, but he paid a fearful price for the distinction. Whereas a humorist, like Mark Twain, who laughed with people, grew gentler and more humane to the very end of his life, Swift, who laughed at people, increasingly cut himself off from human sympathies and grew

more and more bitter with the passing years until, poisoned with his own cynicism, he became the victim of insanity. Perhaps the modern psychopathist would say that the brain disease which ultimately fastened its terrible hold, like an octopus, upon him, was more the cause than the result of his misanthropy.

Swift was born in Ireland, of English parentage. After graduating from the University of Dublin, serving for ten humiliating years as private secretary to a distant relative, Sir William Temple, the essayist, who kept him at the servants' table, and holding a small clerical charge in Ireland, he suddenly jumped into prominence with the publication of The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books in 1704. Straightway he became the foremost political pamphleteer of the day. The Whigs quailed under the lash of his satire and the oldest Tories of the realm bent the knee in obsequious homage to his arrogance.

Upon the fall of the Tories he accepted the deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, a mortifying office for a man of his parts, but the best living open to a man who had penned so scorching a satire on religion as The Tale of a Tub. Swift spent his remaining years in Ireland, very lonely after the death of Esther Johnson, the Stella of his Journal, a beautiful woman who had sacrificed her life upon the altar of his arrogance, yet producing his most popular work, Gulliver's Travels. Be it said to his credit that he always ministered faithfully to the humble folk in his charge and that he compassionately left his fortune to found St. Patrick's Asylum for his fellow-sufferers, the insane. It is a curious paradox that Swift should have originated the phrase "sweetness and light."

"A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name," such is Thackeray's tribute to Addison. One fortunate though dubious simile made Joseph Addison (1672-1719) famous almost overnight. In the summer of 1704 he was a quiet young university graduate traveling on the continent to prepare himself for diplomacy. Then came the battle of Blenheim and Addison accepted the invitation of the Tories to celebrate the victory in verse. The result was The Campaign, in which he likened Marlborough, the commander of the English forces, to an avenging angel:

So when an angel by divine command

With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
(Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past)
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

Addison was made, and he successively became undersecretary, Secretary for Ireland, and Secretary of State. Henceforth he was equally the statesman and the man of letters.

Addison's gentleness and courtesy made him a favorite at the coffee houses. That his later years were marred by quarrels with Pope, Swift, and Steele, is evidence that even the most self-contained of men could not avoid offense in so acrimonious an age. The age of Anne made a fetish of reason, but in all practical matters was curiously subservient to its emotions.

Richard Steele (1672-1729) "Dick" Steele as he was affectionately called — was a sensitive, warm-hearted, optimistic Irishman. His father died when he was five and his mother shortly thereafter. Of his father's death he has left the following infinitely touching account: "I remember I went into the room where his body lay and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin and calling 'Papa,' for, I know not how, I had some slight idea he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and transported beyond all patience of the silent

grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embrace, and told me in a flood of tears, Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him underground whence he could never come to us again."

At the proper age the lad was placed by an uncle in the famous Charterhouse school in London. There he met Addison and then began a friendship which was to bear rich fruit in The Tatler and The Spectator, and to be broken only by an unfortunate political quarrel.

After school Steele took to the army and rose to the rank of Captain, but in the meantime was trying his hand at writing. His first work, a treatise on the Christian Hero, was prompted by the moral looseness that he saw in the army, and was an appeal for Puritan standards of living, in reality an expression of middle class Christian ethics. Next he attempted comedies. These proved to be rather pedantic, commending virtue, but stiff and stilted. Then for a time he edited The Gazette, the official new sheet of the court, and finally hit upon the proper outlet for his genius in The Tatler. Straightway he had all London for his audience. Under the thin disguise of Isaac Bickerstaff, "Steele touched on all those questions of breeding, good taste, courtesy, and chivalry where the middle class had discarded old aristocratic ideals, without having yet learnt to trust entirely to their own. No wonder The Tatler became immensely popular when its readers found their half-formed notions confirmed and proclaimed. The Spectator, with a purer and more human intellectual and moral tone, made still more complete the definition of the new and more democratic culture. This was the great service which Steele, with Addison, rendered to English society.

In his personal life Steele did not altogether measure up to the standards which he advocated. He loved his friends, drank over freely, quarreled with his handsome but petulant wife - his "dear lovely Prue", spent his money with a lavish hand, ventured in wild-cat speculations, and "retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last." Daniel Defoe (?1661-1731) was one of the most prolific writers that England has produced. He was the author of innumerable pamphlets and short papers and at times turned out several novels a year. Moreover he was the first English journalist in the modern sense, the author of the interview and the special editorial.

Defoe was the son of a London butcher by the name of Foe. At the age of forty he added the aristocratic French prefix to boost himself socially. He was a low-bred Englishman, yet with marked literary gifts, and this accounts for the seeming contradictions and paradoxes in his conduct and writings. As a matter of fact, he ran true to form the stamp of the cockney is on all that he did and wrote. He apparently had a real interest in uplifting the lower classes, of which he was a product, but he also itched for gentility. He had not the pride and self respect of the man of breeding, and, with no regard to his own convictions, unblushingly wrote political pamphlets for whichever party chanced to be in power. He championed the cause of the underdog, and yet for twenty years was a secret service agent, spying on criminals and outcasts. He had the characteristic morality of low-class Puritanism and was forever preaching against the obvious sins, yet was insensible to the finer moral feelings that demand consistency and honor.

In 1702, himself a radical non-conformist, he wrote a pamphlet on The Shortest Way with Dissenters, in which he drolly proposed to get rid of such a nuisance as the nonconformist by hanging all the ministers and sending the lay members into exile. Both Anglicans and Dissenters took him seriously and he was placed in the pillory. Thereupon he scattered all over London a waggish Hymn to the Pillory, in doggerel verse, which brought crowds of good-natured burghers to comfort him and so nettled his persecutors that they removed him to Newgate prison. Nothing daunted, he went blithely on with his journalism, putting out a paper, The Review, and, through his association with criminals and adventurers of all sorts, gaining that rich store of incident which

enabled him, between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five, to turn out novels with astonishing rapidity. He was already sixty when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, a romance which took England and all Europe, in fact, by storm.

His last years were most unhappy, for the discovery that he had long been in the secret employ of the government turned the popular mind against him, and he died a real or fancied fugitive from the public.