History of English Literature Volume 3 (of 3)Taine, Hippolyte
History
History of English Literature Volume 3 (of 3)
Taine, Hippolyte
English literature -- History and criticism
Other authors follow in the same track. The literature of that period
might be called the library of the man of feeling. First there was
Richardson, the puritanic printer, with his Sir Charles Grandison, a man
of principles, an accomplished model of a gentleman, a professor of
decorum and morality, with a soul into the bargain. There is Sterne too,
a refined and sickly blackguard, who, amidst his buffooneries and
oddities, pauses to weep over an ass or an imaginary prisoner. There is,
in particular, Henry Mackenzie, "the Man of Feeling," whose timid,
delicate hero weeps five or six times a day; who grows consumptive
through sensibility, dares not broach his love till at the point of
death, and dies in broaching it. Naturally, praise induces satire; and
in the opposite camp we see Fielding, a valiant roisterer, and Sheridan,
a brilliant but naughty fellow, the one with Blifil, the other with
Joseph Surface, two hypocrites, especially the second, not coarse,
red-faced, and smelling of the vestry, like Tartuffe, but worldly,
well-clad, a fine talker, loftily serious, sad and gentle from excess of
tenderness, who, with his hand on his heart and a tear in his eye,
showers on the public his sentences and periods whilst he soils his
brother's reputation and debauches his neighbor's wife. When a man of
feeling has been thus created, he soon has an epic made for him. A
Scotsman, a man of wit, of too much wit, having published on his own
account an unsuccessful rhapsody, wished to recover his expenses,
visited the mountains of his country, gathered picturesque images,
collected fragments of legends, plastered over the whole an abundance of
eloquence and rhetoric, and created a Celtic Homer, Ossian, who with
Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe, and, about
1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French _grisettes_ and
_perruquiers._ Macpherson displayed to the world an imitation of
primitive manners, not over-true, for the extreme rudeness of barbarians
would have shocked the people, but yet well enough preserved or
portrayed to contrast with modern civilization, and persuade the public
that they were looking upon pure nature. A keen sympathy with Scottish
landscape, so grand, so cold, so gloomy, rain on the hills, the birch
trembling to the wind, the mist of heaven and the vague musing of the
soul, so that every dreamer found there the emotions of his solitary
walks and his philosophic sadness; chivalric exploits and magnanimity,
heroes who set out alone to engage an army, faithful virgins dying on
the tomb of their betrothed; an impassioned, colored style, affecting to
be abrupt, yet polished; able to charm a disciple of Rousseau by its
warmth and elegance: here was something to transport the young
enthusiasts of the time; civilized barbarians, scholarly lovers of
nature, dreaming of the delights of savage life, whilst they shook off
the powder which the hairdresser had left on their coats.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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