A Short Note on Eighteenth Century Prose [500 Words +]
A Short Note on Eighteenth Century Prose [500 Words +]
Despite the interesting body of verse that the eighteenth century produced, the works that have worn best and that still hold the general reader most are in prose. Defoe and Swift and Fielding hardly seem to have dated, while Pope and his followers seem artificial to modern readers, and require to be looked at through the glass of historical perspective.' Daniel Defoe was a journalist, and that fact itself draws him to our own time.
The development of the newspaper and the periodical is an interesting literary side line of the seventeenth century. The Civil War undoubtedly stimulated a public appetite for up-to-the minute news and the Restoration period, with its interest in men and affairs, its information services in the coffee houses was developing that wider interest in news-home and foreign- which is so alive to-day. Defoe is, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical, purveying opinion more than news, and The Review, which he founded in 1704, is the progenitor of a long line of 'well-informed' magazines.
Defoe did not see himself primarily as a literary artist: he had things to say to the public, and he said them as clearly as he could, without troubling to polish and revise. There are no stylistic tricks in his writings, no airs and graces, but there is the flavour of colloquial speech, a no-nonsense', down-to-earth simplicity. He was like Swift capable of irony, however, and his shortest way with the Dissenters states gravely that those who do not belong to the Church of England should be hanged.
Eighteenth Century Prose
This pamphlet was taken seriously by many, but, when the authorities discovered they had been having their legs pulled, they put Defoe into prison. Other journalists were Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, Steele started The Tatler, and Addison later joined him, and their writings in this periodical had a moral purpose-they attempted to improve manners, encourage tolerance in religion and politics, condemn fanaticism, and preach a kind of moderation in all things, including the literary art.
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Addison comes into his own in The Spectator, started in 1711, and the most valuable articles of that paper are his. His big achievement is the creation of an imaginary club, its members representing contemporary social types, and one member has become immortal- Sir Roger de Coverley. Sir Roger is the old-type Tory, rather simple minded, thoroughly good-hearted, never for long away from his country estate, full of prejudices and superstitions which are meant to make us smile, but smile sympathetically. Against Sir Roger is set the Whig merchant, Sir Andrew Freeport, a man of less charm than Sir Roger but of far more intelligence.
Addison seems to point to a middle way in politics-there is much good in the old, and one should not scoff at the outmoded ideas of the Tories, but the Whigs stand for progress and with them lies the England of the future. Sir Roger is a find creation, worthy to rank with any of the eccentrics of eighteenth century fiction. Addison's prose-style is an admirable compromise: it has the grace and polish of the artist, the ease and flow and simplicity of the journalist. If Addison has a fault, it lies in a certain sentimentality: he lies to provoke tears, and his humour has sometimes an overgentle whimsicality that makes us long for stronger meat.
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The greatest prose-writer of the first part-perhaps the whole- of the century is Jonathan Swift. A great humorist and a savage satirist his meat is sometimes too powerful even for a healthy stomach. He is capable of pure fun—as in some of his poems and even school boy jokes, but there is a core of bitterness in him which reveals itself finally as a mad hatred of mankind.
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