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Unfit, in these degenerate times of shame,
To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame:
Dear, charming nymph, neglected and decried,
My shame in crowds, my solitary pride.

Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe,
That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st me so;
Thou guide by which the nobler arts excel,

Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well!"

It seems also to have been forgotten by all who advert to the limited quantity of Goldsmith's poetry, that he died at the age of little more than forty-five, in the very vigour of life, when his powers were matured, his imagination heightened, his power of thought strengthened, when much was expected from him, when much we may reasonably believe would have been achieved, and the anticipation of Dr. Johnson realised, that "Every year he lived he would have deserved Westminster Abbey the more." At such an age, Cowper, who became one of our most popular and prolific Poets, was still unknown to the world.

Three natives of Ireland, and the circumstance is not unworthy of remark, stand nearly, if not quite, at the head of our prose literature as regards their styles, though each as different in manner as he was in genius; these are Swift in what is called the plain style, Goldsmith in the middle or more elegant style, and Burke in that of the higher order of eloquence. With the former and the latter we have at present nothing to do. But the claim of Goldsmith to take rank as one of the first, if not the very first of the elegant writers of

our country, must not be passed unnoticed. Addison indeed is not forgotten; he long and worthily occupied that station, nor should any merit be withheld from him to the undue exaltation of any other candidate, as his purity, ease, and idiomatic English, deserve all praise. With something less of purity, Goldsmith has however equal ease, greater perspicuity, more variety, and more strength; if he conjoin therefore at once vigour and ease, and impress the reader more powerfully either by the construction of his sentences or the selection of his words, he may divide at least the palm with Addison, if not seize it from him altogether; a distinction in letters which has been indeed assigned him by more than one professedly critical writer.

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In running over his pages, it will be seen that he is rarely or never to be caught in a long or slovenly sentence; we see none cut short for the sake of mere point, or rounded for its sonorous effect; he is free from every appearance of labour or affectation. The words, which have no resemblance to the "learned length or sound" of those of Johnson, fall into their proper places without seeming effort, and upon the ear with musical cadence. All his earlier as well as later literary labours exhibit the same characteristics, so that his style may be considered formed as much by native good taste or a fine ear, as by study, though the latter was not neglected. If there be a shade of difference in his various productions, the Vicar of Wakefield and Citizen of the World appear to be

written in the simplest manner; in addresses to the public in the way of advertisement for his bookseller, he is, as was probably required of him in order to attract readers, smart, epigrammatic, or antithetical; in his histories, and particularly in the first and some other volumes of Animated Nature, he is eloquent, natural, and polished in a high degree. Without rejecting ornament he is sparing of it; he admits of none that retards for a moment the onward course of his subject, and his language is intelligible to the most unlearned reader. "Taste in writing" he says in a chapter of the Enquiry into Polite Learning which was expunged in the second edition, "is the exhibition of the greatest quantity of beauty and of use, that may be admitted into any description without counteracting each other." By this rule it may be presumed his own style was formed.

Goldsmith as well as Addison, is distinguished more by humour than by wit though this quality is frequent in both; and by a suavity of manner that aims to correct our follies through the medium of gentle raillery or persuasion, rather than by satire authoritative or admonition. They seem like men speaking to men as their equals; neither assuming the lash of the satirist, nor the dictatorial superiority of the philosopher; and this forms one of the reasons why both have secured so strong a hold upon popular favour. If either writer were the subject of strong passions, we should not be led to

suspect it by any thing discoverable in their writings; we find nothing of bitterness, of sarcastic animadversion, no invective, no exaggeration of fact, and in their fictions, no overstraining of character. All is equable, smooth and natural, with an air of good nature and moderation that win upon the reader; both teach the purest morality in the most engaging manner. Between two such writers, it may be difficult to decide which shall have the stronger claim upon our gratitude and esteem; both have laboured for the correction of our follies, for the inculcation of the best principles, and by the literary as well as moral excellence of their writings, have thrown no common brilliancy over the popular literature of their country.

"The wreath of Goldsmith" says Sir Walter Scott "is unsullied; he wrote to exalt virtue and expose vice; and he accomplished his task in a manner which raises him to the highest rank among British authors. We close his volume (the novel) with a sigh that such an author should have written so little from the stores of his own genius, and that he should have been so prematurely removed from the sphere of literature which he so highly adorned."

"There is" says Cumberland, and no ordinary merit could have extracted such testimony from him, "something in Goldsmith's prose that to my ear is uncommonly sweet and harmonious; it is clear, simple, easy to be understood; we never

want to read his period over except for the pleasure it bestows; obscurity never calls us back to a repetition of it."

"As a prose writer" says Dr. Anderson in his British Poets "Goldsmith must be allowed to have rivalled and even exceeded Dr. Johnson and his imitator Dr. Hawkesworth, the most celebrated professional prose writer of his time. His prose may be regarded as the model of perfection, and the standard of our language; to equal which the efforts of most will be vain, and to exceed it, every expectation, folly."

To these may be added what is sufficient for the fame of any writer, the well-known eulogium of Johnson, who in the life of Parnell characterizes Goldsmith as “a man of such variety of powers and such felicity of performance that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing; a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and easy without weakness.”

Were not the decisions of criticism as different as the several writers of it, we should be often surprised at the variations they display. In the opinion formed of Goldsmith's prose, as well as of certain points in his poetry, Sir James Mackintosh again seems to dissent from general opinion; but we may account for this perhaps by remembering that his own style of composition differs widely from so unaffected a model; his defect in

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