Select Search
World Factbook
Roget's Int'l Thesaurus
Bartlett's Quotations
Respectfully Quoted
Fowler's King's English
Strunk's Style
Mencken's Language
Cambridge History
The King James Bible
Oxford Shakespeare
Gray's Anatomy
Farmer's Cookbook
Post's Etiquette
Brewer's Phrase & Fable
Bulfinch's Mythology
Frazer's Golden Bough
All Verse
Anthologies
Dickinson, E.
Eliot, T.S.
Frost, R.
Hopkins, G.M.
Keats, J.
Lawrence, D.H.
Masters, E.L.
Sandburg, C.
Sassoon, S.
Whitman, W.
Wordsworth, W.
Yeats, W.B.
All Nonfiction
Harvard Classics
American Essays
Einstein's Relativity
Grant, U.S.
Roosevelt, T.
Wells's History
Presidential Inaugurals
All Fiction
Shelf of Fiction
Ghost Stories
Short Stories
Shaw, G.B.
Stein, G.
Stevenson, R.L.
Wells, H.G.
Reference
>
Cambridge History
>
From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift
>
Steele and Addison
> Literature and Clubland
Influence of the Coffeehouses
Beginnings of
The Tattler
CONTENTS
·
VOLUME CONTENTS
·
INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS
·
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes
(190721).
Volume IX. From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift.
II.
Steele and Addison
.
§ 5. Literature and Clubland.
Men learned other things in coffee-houses besides the amenities of social intercourse. Clubland had taken so universal a hold on London that nearly every man of intelligence frequented some resort of this kind. Now, these were just the people who read and wrote books; they created thought and taste; the future of literature depended on their ideas and ways of expression. Until the time of the restoration, neither writers nor readers had practised the studied simplicity of true conversation. Even pamphleteers like Nashe, Dekker or Rowlands, whose one aim was to follow popular taste, had never broken away from book knowledge, despite their slipshod style, and the literary cliques which handed round manuscript essays and characters had reproduced in their writings only such conversation as might be a vehicle for their clinches and conceits. Men had confined their literary interests to the library and, as a consequence, their style was either ponderous or precious. The Royal Society had already started a movement against redundance of phrase; but it may well be doubted whether the protests of Spratt, Evelyn and South
9
would have had lasting effect without the influence of coffee-houses. It was here that, besides practising benevolence in small things, men learnt to unravel literary ideas in a style that was colloquial as well as cultured. Conversation has a mysterious power of awakening thought. Commonplaces and trifles appear in a new light, and fresh notions are continually struck off like sparks. The man who has formed his mind by intercourse is more versatile and alert than he whose intellect has grown by reading, and he has learnt to speak in short simple sentences, because the ear cannot, like the eye, follow long periods. Moreover, he must abandon the phraseology of books, because the written word had long assumed a formal, almost impersonal, air, and must borrow turns and phrases from daily parlance to give an individual touch to his theories.
9
Thus, the middle classes were accomplishing their own education. They were becoming thinkers with a culture and a standard of manners born of conversation and free from pedantry of thought or expression. Coffee-houses had given them a kind of organisation; a means of exchanging ideas and forming the public opinion of their class. But this spirit was at present manifest only in the atmosphere where it had been formed. It was not found in theatres, universities or
salons.
Coffee-houses had unconsciously become fraternities for the propagation of a new humanism, and a writer could come into touch with the ideas and sentiments of the age only in those centres.
10
Note 9
.
Ante,
Vol. VIII, chap.
XVI.
[
back
]
CONTENTS
·
VOLUME CONTENTS
·
INDEX OF ALL CHAPTERS
·
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Influence of the Coffeehouses
Beginnings of
The Tattler
Shakespeare
·
Bible
·
Strunk
·
Anatomy
·
Nonfiction
·
Quotations
·
Reference
·
Fiction
·
Poetry
©
19932020
Bartleby.com
· [
Top 150
] ·
Subjects
·
Titles
·
Authors
·
World Lit
·
Free Essays