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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

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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 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.

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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.

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Goldsmith was now fairly well known to the literary public, and in March 1766 he became more so by the publication of his belated novel, The Vicar of Wakefield. Mr. Austin Dobson has lately proved that this famous book did not please so quickly and so completely as has been taken for granted. Goldsmith received £60 for it, but it hardly paid its expenses during his lifetime. It has been pointed out that Goethe was one of the first critics to give The Vicar its full and unstinted measure of praise, and to insist on its recognition as not merely a pleasing or a well-written but as an immortal story. Its place in literature is now fixed beyond all possibility of dislodgment. In the sudden and unexplained decline of the English novel it is the only book of the second generation which holds its rank with the masterpieces of the first, with the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is deeply to be deplored that this fresh and bright, though immature, Joseph Andrews of Goldsmith's was succeeded by no Tom Jones of its author's finished prime. But the entire body of Goldsmith's works is a collection of specimens and fragments. In 1768 the success of The Good Natur'd Man emboldened the improvident Goldsmith to fit out another and a too splendid apartment in Brick Court, and with this he was shackled until he died. Many a child of twelve has a juster sense of the value of money, and what it will or will not fetch, than this adult creature of genius.

Writing copiously and continuously, Goldsmith from this. time forth added nothing to prose literature which has lived. Biographies and histories, "brevities" and "abridgments," make up the tale of his hurried and painful struggle to win enough to keep his payments abreast of his engagements. He was an honest soul, if ever there lived one, but he had none of the convenient Philistine virtues, and all the good advice and sound sense of Johnson could not keep him from dying £2000 in debt. It has been thought that he was describing himself when, in the Enquiry into Polite Learning, he speaks of an author as one whose "simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of cunning, his sensibility to the slightest invasions of contempt, though

possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings so exquisitely poignant as to agonise under the slightest disappointment." In 1769 Goldsmith was appointed Professor of History to the new Royal Academy; but as this honour brought no emolument, he said it was like a pair of ruffles to a man without a shirt. Almost the last event in his troubled life was the production of She Stoops to Conquer in 1773; before the bustle which attended this play in its first success had subsided, the author succumbed, in his forty-sixth year, to a complaint which fed with ease on his exhausted constitution. This was on the 4th of April 1774.

In prose style, as in poetic, it is noticeable that Goldsmith has little in common with his great contemporaries, with their splendid bursts of rhetoric, and Latin pomp of speech, but that he goes back to the perfect plainness and simple grace of the Queen Anne men. He aims at a straightforward effect of pathos or of humour, accompanied, as a rule, with a colloquial ease of expression, an apparent absence of all effort or calculation. It is remarkable that it is only in his Enquiry into Polite Learning, which was written before he personally knew Johnson, that he makes any pretension to the sesquipedalian bow-wow. Perhaps, when he came to know Johnson privately, he was influenced less by that great man's writings than by his simple, humorous, and powerful conversation. Few English writers, always excepting Johnson, hold so prominent a place as Goldsmith in literary anecdote. We know him as though we had lived with him, and see the rough ugly face, with its bright smile, the awkward limbs tricked out beyond the fashion with the Tyrian bloom of velvets and of satins, the guttural Irish voice that tripped itself up upon the hesitating lips,-in short, the living portrait of the wonderful man who wore his heart upon his sleeve and found plenty of daws to peck at it. No figure, for all its shortcomings, is more endeared to us than his; and above all criticism of the poems, the prose, the dramas, some of which, to say the truth, a less interesting person than he might have composed, there rises the extraordinary sym

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