Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from
wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth
century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping
post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of
rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he
opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form
or other. It is not only in such novels as those of Fielding and
Smollett, which are intended to describe the lower classes of society,
and in which blackened eyes and broken heads are relished forms of wit,
that the modern reader is offended by the continual infliction of pain.
Goldsmith gives Squire Thornhill perfect impunity from the law and from
public opinion in his crimes. Mackenzie does not think of visiting any
legal retribution on his "Man of the World." Godwin wrote "Caleb
Williams" to show with what impunity man preyed on man, how powerless
the tenant and the dependent woman lay before the violence or the
intrigue of the rich. And it is not only that a crime should be
committed with perfect security which would now receive a severe
sentence at the hands of an ordinary judge and jury which surprises the
reader of to-day, but that scenes which would now shock any person of
common humanity or taste, were, in the last century, especially
intended to amuse.
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