Queen Caroline, whose keen intellect was allied to a coarseness which makes her a representative of the age, was considerably attracted by theological discussion. She obtained a bishopric for Berkeley, recommended Walpole to read Butler’s Analogy, which was at one time her daily companion at the breakfast-table, and made the preferment of its author one of her last requests to the king. She liked well to reason with Dr. Samuel Clarke, ‘of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate,’ and wished to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, but was told that he was not sufficiently orthodox. Theology was not disregarded under the first and second Georges; it was only religion that had fallen into disrepute. The law itself was calculated to excite contempt for the most solemn of religious services. ‘I was early,’ Swift writes to Stella, ‘with the Secretary (Bolingbroke), but he was gone to his devotions and to receive the sacrament. Several rakes did the same. It was not for piety, but for employment, according to Act of Parliament.’
A glance at some additional features in the social condition of the age will enable us to understand better the character of its literature.
III.
It is a platitude to say that authors are as much affected as other men by the atmosphere which they breathe. Now and then a consummate man of genius seems to stand so much above his age as for all high purposes of art to be untouched by it. Like Milton as a poet, though not as a prose writer, his ‘soul is like a star and dwells apart;’ but in general, imaginative writers, are intensely affected by the society from which they draw many of their intellectual resources. In the so-called ‘Augustan age’ this influence would have been felt more strongly than in ours, since the range of men of letters was generally restricted to what was called the Town. They wrote for the critics in the coffee-houses, for the noblemen from whom they expected patronage, and for the political party they were pledged to support.
England during the first half of the eighteenth century was in many respects uncivilized. London was at that time separated from the country by roads that were often impassable and always dangerous. Travellers had to protect themselves as they best could from the attacks of highwaymen, who infested every thoroughfare leading from the metropolis, while the narrow area of the city was guarded by watchmen scarcely better fitted for its protection than Dogberry and Verges. Readers of the Spectator will remember how when Sir Roger de Coverley went to the play, his servants ‘provided themselves with good oaken plants’ to protect their master from the Mohocks, a set of dissolute young men, who, for sheer amusement, inflicted the most terrible punishments on their victims. Swift tells Stella how he came home early from his walk in the Park to avoid ‘a race of rakes that play the devil about this town every night, and slit people’s noses,’ and he adds, as if party were at the root of every mischief in the country, that they were all Whigs. ‘Who has not trembled at the Mohock’s name?’ is Gay’s exclamation in his Trivia; and in that curious poem he also warns the citizens not to venture across Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the evening. Colley Cibber’s brazen-faced daughter, Mrs. Charke, in the Narrative of her life, describes also with sufficient precision the dangers of London after dark.
The infliction of personal injury was not confined to the desperadoes of the streets. Men of letters were in danger of chastisement from the poets or politicians whom they criticised or vilified. De Foe often mentions attempts upon his person. Pope, too, was threatened with a rod by Ambrose Philips, which was hung up for his chastisement in Button’s Coffee-house; and at a later period, when his satires had stirred up a nest of hornets, the poet was in the habit of carrying pistols, and taking a large dog for his companion when walking out at Twickenham.
Weddings within the liberties of the Fleet by sham clergymen, or clergymen confined for debt, were the source of numberless evils. Every kind of deception was practised, and the victims once in the clutches of their reverend captors had to pay heavily for the illegal ceremony. Ladies were trepanned into matrimony, and Smollett in his History observes, that the Fleet parsons encouraged every kind of villainy. It is astonishing that so great an evil in the heart of London should have been allowed to exist so long, and it was not until the Marriage Act of Lord Hardwicke in 1753, which required the publication of banns, that the Fleet marriages ceased. On the day before the Act came into operation three hundred marriages are said to have taken place.
Marriages of a more lawful kind were generally conducted on business principles. Young women were expected to accept the husband selected for them by their parents or guardians, and the main object considered was to gain a good settlement. It was for this that Mary Granville, who is better known as Mrs. Delany, was sacrificed at seventeen to a gouty old man of sixty, and when he died she was expected to marry again with the same object in view. Mrs. Delany detested, with good cause, the commercial estimate of matrimony. Writing, in 1739, to Lady Throckmorton, she says, ‘Miss Campbell is to be married to-morrow to my Lord Bruce. Her father can give her no fortune; she is very pretty, modest, well-behaved, and just eighteen, has two thousand a year jointure, and four hundred pin-money; they say he is cross, covetous, and threescore years old, and this unsuitable match is the admiration of the old and the envy of the young! For my part I pity her, for if she has any notion of social pleasures that arise from true esteem and sensible conversation, how miserable must she be.’
Girls dowered with beauty or with fortune were not always suffered to marry in this humdrum fashion. Abduction was by no means an imaginary peril. Mrs. Delany tells the story of a lady in Ireland, from whom she received the relation, who was entrapped in her uncle’s house, carried off by four men in masks, and treated in the most brutal manner. And in 1711 the Duke of Newcastle, having become acquainted with a design for carrying off his daughter by force, was compelled to ask for a guard of dragoons.
Duelling, against which Steele, De Foe, and Fielding inveighed with courage and good sense, was a danger to which every gentleman was liable who wore a sword. Bullies were ready to provoke a quarrel, the slightest cause of offence was magnified into an affair of honour, and the lives of several of the most distinguished men of the century were imperilled in this way. ‘A gentleman,’ Lord Chesterfield writes, ‘is every man who, with a tolerable suit of clothes, a sword by his side, and a watch and snuffbox in his pockets, asserts himself to be a gentleman, swears with energy that he will be treated as such, and that he will cut the throat of any man who presumes to say the contrary.’
The foolish and evil custom died out slowly in this kingdom. Even a great moralist like Dr. Johnson had something to say in its defence, and Sir Walter Scott, who might well have laughed to scorn any imputation of cowardice, was prepared to accept a challenge in his old age for a statement he had made in his Life of Napoleon.
Ladies had a different but equally doubtful mode of asserting their gentility. On one occasion the Duchess of Marlborough called on a lawyer without leaving her name. ‘I could not make out who she was,’ said the clerk afterwards, ‘but she swore so dreadfully that she must be a lady of quality.’
There was a fashion which our wits followed at this time that was not of English growth, namely, the tone of gallantry in which they addressed ladies, no matter whether single or married. Their compliments seemed like downright love-making, and that frequently of a coarse kind, but such expressions meant nothing, and were understood to be a mere exercise of skill. Pope used them in writing to Judith Cowper, whom he professes to worship as much as any female saint in heaven; and in much ampler measure when addressing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but neither lady would have taken this amatory politeness seriously. Thus he writes after an evening spent in Lady Mary’s society: ‘Books have lost their effect upon me; and I was convinced since I saw you, that there is something more powerful than philosophy, and since I heard you, that there is one alive wiser than all the sages.’ He tells her that he hates all other women for her sake; that none but her guardian angels can have her more constantly in mind; and that the sun has more reason to be pr
oud of raising her spirits ‘than of raising all the plants and ripening all the minerals in the earth.’ He will fly to her in Italy at the least notice and ‘from thence,’ he adds, ‘how far you might draw me and I might run after you, I no more know than the spouse in the song of Solomon.’
This was the foible of an age in which women were addressed as though they were totally devoid of understanding; and Pope, as might have been expected, carried the folly to excess.
Against another French custom Addison protests in the Spectator, namely, that of women of rank receiving gentlemen visitors in their bedrooms. He objects also to other foreign habits introduced by ‘travelled ladies,’ and fears that the peace, however much to be desired, may cause the importation of a number of French fopperies. But the proneness to follow the lead of France in matters of fashion is a folly not confined to the belles and beaux of the last century.
If a chivalric regard for women be an indication of high civilization, that sign is but faintly visible in the reigns of Anne and of the first Georges. Sir Richard Steele paid a noble tribute to Lady Elizabeth Hastings when he said that to know her was a liberal education, but his contemporaries usually treat women as pretty triflers, better fitted to amuse men than to elevate them. Young takes this view in his Satires:
‘Ladies supreme among amusements reign; By nature born to soothe and entertain. Their prudence in a share of folly lies; Why will they be so weak as to be wise?’
and Chesterfield, writing to his son, treats women with similar contempt.... ‘A man of sense,’ he says, ‘only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them as he does with a sprightly, forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters, though he often makes them believe that he does both, which is the thing in the world that they are proud of.... No flattery is either too high or too low for them. They will greedily swallow the highest and gratefully accept of the lowest.’
Nearly twenty years passed, and then Chesterfield wrote in the same contemptuous way of women in a letter to his godson, a ‘dear little boy’ of ten.
‘In company every woman is every man’s superior, and must be addressed with respect, nay, more, with flattery, and you need not fear making it too strong ... it will be greedily swallowed.’
Even Addison, while trying to instruct the ‘Fair Sex’ as he likes to call them, apparently regarded its members as an inferior order of beings. He delights to dwell upon their foibles, on their dress, and on the thousand little artifices practised by the flirt and the coquette. Here is the view the Queen Anne moralist takes of the ‘female world’ he was so eager to improve:
‘I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them, rather as they are women, than as they are reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the species. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjustment of their hair the principal employment of their lives. The sorting of a suit of ribands is considered a very good morning’s work; and if they make an excursion to a mercer’s or a toy-shop, so great a fatigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their more serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their greatest drudgery the preparations of jellies and sweetmeats. This I say is the state of ordinary women; though I know there are multitudes of those that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all the beauties of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind of awe and respect as well as of love into their male beholders.’
The qualification made at the end of this description does not greatly lessen the significance of the earlier portion, which is Addison’s picture, as he is careful to tell us of ‘ordinary women.’ Much must be allowed for the exaggeration of a humourist, but the frivolity of women is a theme upon which Addison harps continually. Indeed, were it not for this weakness in the ‘feminine world’ half his vocation as a moralist in the Spectator would be gone, and if the general estimate in his Essays of the women with whom he was acquainted be to any extent a correct one, the derogatory language used by men of letters, and especially by Swift, Prior, Pope, and Chesterfield may be almost forgiven.
It was the aim of Addison and Steele to represent, and in some degree to caricature, the follies of fashionable life in the Town. That life had also its vices, which, if less unblushingly displayed than under the ‘merry Monarch,’ were visible enough. ‘In the eighteenth century,’ says Victor Hugo, in his epigrammatic way, ‘the wife bolts out her husband. She shuts herself up in Eden with Satan. Adam is left outside.’
Drunkenness was a habit familiar to the fine gentlemen of the town and to men occupying the highest position in the State. Harley went more than once into the queen’s presence in a half-intoxicated condition; Carteret when Secretary of State, if Horace Walpole may be credited, was never sober; Bolingbroke, who practised every vice, is said to have been a ‘four-bottle man;’ and Swift found it perilous to dine with Ministers on account of the wine which circulated at their tables. ‘Prince Eugene,’ he writes, ‘dines with the Secretary to-day with about seven or eight general officers or foreign Ministers. They will be all drunk I am sure.’ Pope’s frail body could not tolerate excess, and he is said to have hastened his end by good living. His friend Fenton ‘died of a great chair and two bottles of port a day.’ Parnell, who seems to have been in many respects a man of high character, is said to have shortened his life by intemperance; and Gay, who was cossetted like a favourite lapdog by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, died from indolence and good living.
It may be questioned whether there is a single Wit of the age who did not love port too well, like Addison and Fenton, or suffer from ‘carnivoracity’ like Arbuthnot. Every section of English society was infected with the ‘devil drunkenness,’ and the passion for gin created by the encouragement of home distilleries produced a state of crime, misery, and disease in London and in the country which excited public attention. ‘Small as is the place,’ writes Mr. Lecky, ‘which this fact occupies in English history, it was probably, if we consider all the consequences that have flowed from it, the most momentous in that of the eighteenth century — incomparably more so than any event in the purely political or military annals of the country.’
The cruelty of the age is seen in a contempt for the feelings of others, in the brutal punishments inflicted, in the amusements then popular, and in a general contempt for human suffering. Public executions were so frequent that they were disregarded; and criminals of any note, like Dr. Dodd, were exhibited in their cells for the gaolers’ benefit prior to execution; mad people in Bedlam, chained in their cells, also formed one of the sights of London. As late as 1735 men were pressed to death who refused to plead on a capital charge; and women were publicly flogged, and were also burnt at the stake by a law that was not repealed until 1794. Of the heads on Temple Bar, daily exposed to Johnson’s eyes in his beloved Fleet Street, we are reminded by an apposite quotation of Goldsmith; and Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, who died as recently as 1855, remembered having seen one there in his childhood. The public exhibition of offenders in the pillory was not calculated to refine the manners of the people. It afforded a cruel entertainment to the mob, who may be said to have baited these poor victims as they were accustomed to bait bulls and bears. Every kind of offensive missile was thrown at them, and sometimes the strokes proved deadly.
Men who could thus torture a human being were not likely to abstain from cruelty to the lower animals. The poets indeed protested then, as poets had done before, and always have done since, against the unmanly treatment of the dumb fellow-creatures committed to our care, but their voices were little heeded, and even the Prince of Wales visited Hockley-in-the-Hole, in disguise, to witness the torturing of bulls. ‘The gladiatorian and other sanguinary sports,’ says the author of the Characteristics, ‘which we allow our people, discover sufficiently our national taste. And the baiting
s and slaughters of so many sorts of creatures, tame as well as wild, for diversion merely, may witness the extraordinary inclination we have for amphitheatrical spectacles.’
The majesty of the law was maintained by disembowelling traitors, by cutting off the ears, or branding the cheeks of political offenders, and by the penalties inflicted on Roman Catholics, and on Protestant dissenters. Men who deemed themselves honourable gained power through bribery and intrigue. It was through a king’s mistress and a heavy bribe that Bolingbroke was enabled to return from exile; Chesterfield intrigued against Newcastle with the Duchess of Yarmouth; and clergymen eager for promotion had no scruple in paying court to women who had lost their virtue.
Never, unless perhaps during the Civil War, was the spirit of party more rampant in the country. Patriotism was a virtue more talked about than felt, and in the cause of faction private characters were assailed and libels circulated through the press. Addison, who did more than any other writer to humanize his age, saw the evil of the time and struck a blow at it with his inimitable humour. The Spectator discovers, on his journey to Sir Roger de Coverley’s house, that the knight’s Toryism grew with the miles that separated him from London:
Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series Page 174