At Hallow-Fair, where browsters rare Keep gude ale on the gantries, "Here chapman billies tak' their stand, To trick the silly fallows; Hech, sirs! what cairds and tinklers come, And spae-wives fenzying to be dumb, To thrive that day!" Fergusson is familiar, however, as Burns never was, with the town life of the poor in Edinburgh, and he is perhaps most himself when he paints the world as he saw it from his desk in the office of the Commissary Clerk. Not very great in himself, a knowledge of Fergusson is yet a necessary introduction to the complete study of Burns. In closing a description of the poetry of an age, there is a great temptation to draw the threads neatly together in an effective conclusion. But in the case of the eighteenth century this can be done only at the expense of truth. That system of poetics which sprang into existence with Waller, became dominant under Dryden, reached its pinnacle in Pope, and was continued by Goldsmith and Johnson, after being partially transformed by Thomson and Gray, did not finish in any glow of Alexandrianism, nor reach, except in Darwin, any final Gongorian extravagance. It simply divided its current into shallow streams and sank in the desert, leaving a dry district between itself and the approaching flood of romanticism. In 1780 every poem which we have mentioned was either produced or planned, and nothing in a similar style, of even fifth-rate promise, was being given to the world. The names of the candidates for fame were such as John Wolcot, Anna Seward "the Swan of Lichfield," the guileless Anna Letitia X THE NEW ERA 343 Barbauld, and the amorous votaries of Della Crusca. Even these nonentities belong to a slightly later date. Of the great, or even of the considerable poets of the new era, only two had hitherto given any specimens of their art, and those most unimportant ones, to the public; since of what was in store for English poetry little could be guessed from The Olney Hymns or The Candidate. If Cowper and Crabbe were still unknown, the rest of the chorus was immature indeed. Blake, the visionary engraver's apprentice, had still his Poetical Sketches snug in the table-drawer. Burns, yet unambitious, was roving "where busy ploughs are whistling thrang," a fresh-coloured farmboy and no more. Wordsworth was a child of ten, Scott and Coleridge eight years old, Landor five, Campbell three, Byron and the rest not born. So, partly by the accidental shortening of the lives of the most eminent poets of the passing age, since neither Gray nor Thomson nor Collins nor Goldsmith nor Chatterton lived to be an elderly man, a calm and fallow period was left between the extinction of the old and the creation of the new school. The artificial poetry died of sheer exhaustion, as last year's leaves fall off without waiting for the new buds to push them from their places. When Cowper and Crabbe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, were ready to try their new effects, there was no resistance to their music. They piped upon an empty stage to an audience whose appetite for song had been whetted by a long interval of perfect hush, in a theatre where even the nibblings of such a mouse as Hayley could be heard through the portentous silence. CHAPTER XI THE PROSE OF THE DECADENCE · THE presence of two writers of incomparable splendour makes the prose field of the close of our period seem more attractive than the poetic. But in reality we trace the same elements in the former as in the latter. The anxieties of the American War, the hollow calm which preceded the French Revolution, the general interest in and apprehension regarding purely political questions, seem to have deadened the intellectual life of the country, or to have diverted it into the channels of action. Between 1770 and 1780 the pamphlet once more became the vehicle of what was most strenuous and impassioned in contemporary writing, and books, though still numerous enough, did not, with a few exceptions, possess much vitality. Johnson was dictator through all this generation, and beyond it; and what was best in prose was supported, directly or indirectly, by his influence-directly in the cases of Burke, Goldsmith, and Boswell; indirectly in that of Gibbon. Magnificence of phrase, something of the tumid pomp of Johnson, became requisite in all serious prose writing; and both Gibbon and Burke added the glory of colour to the splendour of form of the Lexicographer. In the hands of these two masters the prose of the eighteenth century did not sink into insignificance, as poetry did in the hands of the versifiers, but became so heavy with gold and jewels, so radiant with massy ornaments of bullion, that the first duty of the next generation was to simplify it, and CHAP. XI GOLDSMITH 345 to reduce the volume of the sonorous sentences. In this regard, Gibbon, who died unaffected in style by a coming post-revolutionary age, is more typical of the school than Burke, who carried his impassioned rhetoric over into a new atmosphere, and became almost a modern nineteenth-century writer. Entirely untouched by this magnificence, which we have suggested as characteristic of the period, is Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), whose graceful poetry and cheerful comedies have already occupied our attention, and who must now be considered as one of the most delicate of English prose-writers. Goldsmith was born in Pallas, in County Longford, on the 10th November 1728, but spent his childhood at Lissoy, in Westmeath, the putative "Auburn of The Deserted Village. In 1744 he went to Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar, and enjoyed a wretchedly undistinguished university career. He was rejected for holy orders, he proposed to run away to America, he tried the law, and at last, in 1753, he managed to be admitted into the Medical School in Edinburgh. Goldsmith was idle, unattractive, and unpromising as a youth, and at six-and-twenty seemed to be as fine an example of the hopeless ne'er-do-weel as any one might wish to see. At that age he went over to Leyden, took a very obscure and dubious degree at Louvain, and then, in imitation of Baron Holberg, set out as a pedestrian flute-player, or, as Johnson put it, "disputed his passage through Europe" for a year. His first introduction to the purlieus of literature was made by his appointment as proof-reader to the press of Samuel Richardson, while in 1757 he engaged himself to work for the Monthly Review of the bookseller Griffiths. Goldsmith's life was still for a long while full of troubles; no man was ever slower in finding work to which he could successfully set his hand. One appointment after another came to nothing; he tried at last to earn his bread as an hospital mate, but was rejected in Surgeon's Hall as not qualified. It was in his thirty-second year that his first original book saw the light, a little Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a presumptuous, but very bright and daring little treatise in criticism. Goldsmith now got plenty of journalistic work to do, and in 1762 he achieved a place in literature with the two volumes of his delightful Citizen of the World, at first anonymous. In these letters he frankly imitated Montesquieu, but in a manner so fresh and brisk, with so gay a vein of satire, that this little book remains one of the classics of the century. The biographers of Goldsmith, however, have rightly observed that his success had become assured before this, and that the "birthday of his life" was the 31st of May 1761, when Percy brought the great Johnson, in a new wig, to sup at Goldsmith's lodgings in Wine Office Court. From this moment to the close of Goldsmith's life the great good tyrant of literature watched over him like an elder brother, and took care that Goldsmith's delicate and easily disheartened temperament should never be so strained by dejection as to lack elasticity for the rebound. One of the mysteries of eighteenth-century biography is the tangled web of anecdote which attributes to Johnson the sale of a novel which Goldsmith had in 1762 already planned, if not completely written, The Vicar of Wakefield. Exceedingly confused is the whole history of this famous book, which seems to have been sold in sections, at various times, to various publishers. Meanwhile, Goldsmith was engaged in hack-work of all kinds, and never again, until the close of his weary career, was he free from the toil of book-building, the compilation of readable, but above all, of saleable summaries of second-hand knowledge. The names of these works, which do not belong to literature, although Goldsmith signed their title-pages, cannot be expected here. The miracle is that, doomed as he was to trail a pen in the service of these freebooters of Grub Street, he ever found time or inclination for the production of his private masterpieces. In 1765 he arrests our attention, not merely by his appearance as a poet, but by the facts that he collected his agreeable Essays into a volume, and that he moved from Islington into lodgings, first in Wine Office Court, and then in the Temple, where he received his friends in purple silk breeches and a scarlet roquelaure buttoned to the chin. |