BOOKS AND WRITERS M R. POSTERITY (as Goldsmith called our descendants)
may possibly regard the eighteenth century as the high- tide of British achievement, when he considers the prose of Addison, the poetry of Pope, the conversation of Dr. Johnson, the campaigns of Marlborough, the palaces of the nobility, the preaching of Wesley, and the growth of the House of Commons into the effective and not unamiable 'bear-garden which it still is. All these are achievements of that great century. But they are out- standing achievements and therefore they are not typical. If one wished to convey the life and feeling of the time as it normally was, when it was most itself, Goldsmith would better serve the purpose. An omnibus selection by Mr. Garnett,* which contains most of his -works, and almost all of them that are excellent, is not only very good reading, but one might often be tempted to present such a pretty book to a friend ; as one did so one could say, "Here is the
eighteenth century." .
Goldsmith was not at the very top of achievement. But Dr. Johnson's epitaph is just. He attempted every kind of writing, and he touched nothing he did not adorn. He wrote a very good story in The Vicar of Wakefield, a very good poem in The Deserted Village, a very good play in She Stoops to Conquer, a very good biography in The Life of Richard Nash, Esq., and many very good essays in The Citizen of the World. And perhaps if he had lived longer he would have written better still. He was a late developer. He-produced nothing of much value till he was thirty, and when he died at the age of forty-five he was still improving. The Deserted Village was better than The Traveller and She Stoops to Conquer was better than The Good Natured Man.
But it is useless to speculate. He would not have produced any work of absolute genius if he had lived to be a hundred. The Rape of the Lock and Tom Jones would have been equally beyond him. But he would have continued to delight mankind by the apparent artlessness with which he practised the art of writing and by the easy terms on which he stood with Nature. His talk about Nature is indeed worth studying. It was a common topic in his age, but few had his giff for getting at the truth of it. He was fond of praising elegance and ease, and he found both of them in Nature rather than in Society. And he found Nature in any place where it was permitted to be unconventional. At a party or in a club he was notoriously ill at ease ; in a garret or a coach or a tavern he found the real things of life. Yet he was a social success in his own • way too. In spite of his silence and his silliness in company, he was received into what was really the most distinguished coterie in London, and at the age of forty he was elected Professor of Ancient History to the Royal Academy on the strength of a mere compilation. He could not be dull with his pen. Even his com- pilations are fascinating. And he was able to add to his literary gifts a useful gift of exciting compassion.
Above all, he was a superb journalist. He wrote for money, and therefore he wrote to please, and in consequence we know from his works what interested readers in the middle of the eighteenth century, and it is charming to find them so much like ourselves. We meet with fads and fancies in politics and in society which are very much our own. The older people of our time remember those whO"alleged that children are to be every day plunged in cold water4 and, whatever be their constitution, indiscriminately enured to cold and moisture," while among the younger people there are those who believe that children are never to be corrected when young for fear of breaking their spirits when old." Of the many breeds of dogs he says that " here " (meaning in England) "the ugliest and the most useless of their kind will be entertained merely for their singularity ; and, being imported only to be looked at, they - will lose even that small degree of sagacity which they possessed , in their natural climates." In politics we, too, perhaps have amongst us some "who make it their business to frame new reports at every
* Goldsmith. Selected Works, chosen by ,Richard Garnett. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 2ls.) convenient interval, all tending to denounce ruin both on their contemporaries and their posterity. This denunciation is eagerly caught up by the public: away they fling to propagate the distress: sell out at one place, buy in at another, grumble at their governors, shout in mobs, and when they have thus, for some time, behaved like fools, sit down coolly. to argue and talk wisdom." It is pan of the charm of Goldsmith and of a good deal of eighteenth. century literature that, when they seem to poke fun, the writer cannot tell whether he is being serious, nor can the reader either. But it may be that this is characteristic of English writing in general. It is a very intense kind of irony perhaps, just because we cannot tell whether it is irony or not. It is the English humour.
, But Goldsmith was in fact as Irishman, and we are apt to find some of the endearing qualities of the Irish in him. He was incur- ably generous, improvident and childlike ; he provided himself with the luxuries of life whenever he could, but often at the price of dispensing with its necessities ;' he was sordid and splendid by turns ; he had good nerves and an active rqind ; he sometimes felt his wrongs acutely. Now this is just the Englishman's idea of an • Irishman. But we must not make too much of--it. For this par- ticular -Irishman left his native count' y when he was twenty and never returned to it. He was not particularly Irish, not nearly so Irish as Bernard Shaw for instance. He had not Shaw's friendly malice nor his pleasure at being in a minority of one.
Of course Goldsmith had his limitations, but one of his great gifts was to learn what they were. In his first publication, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, he was no doubt influenced by Swift, but it was not his line. He then started a weekly' journal in imitation of Addison's Spectator. He called it the Bee, and it certainly kept him busy, but bee-like he was apt to get annoyed and buzz and even sting, which a Spectator never does. But he learnt his lesson, and in his Chinese Letters he was able to practise Addison's detachment, and sometimes about as well as Addison himself. The Vicar of Wakefield is a ridiculously improbable tale, but it is so modest that it wins all hearts, and the reader does not readily lay aside what Goldsmith himself called "this Thing." As a poet he attempted no flights ; his melancholy in The Deserted Village is not the classic melancholy of Gray's Elegy, though it is exquisite in its own sentimental way,. and it goes back to nature for fresh inspiration whenever it threatens to flag. And that is where the comedies get their value, too, and on She Stoops to Conquer Goldsmith's fame must finally rest. The situation is not a convincing one but it is very skilfully managed. and the dialogue." keeps the reader in touch with flesh and blood,- so. vastly superior to Congreve's brilliant tinsel. One wishes Gold- smith had written a tragedy, and yet on reflection one does not He had not the big guns for tragedy.- What one really wishes is that he had attempted just one great thing. Yet once again one hardly wishes that. He could do so much with ease that it is as senseless to ask that he should wrestle with a masterpiece as to ask that Mr. Garnett's charming selection should be stiffer.'
There is indeed only one thing to criticise in what Mr. Garnett has done. He whets our appetite for more of the Animated Nature by the brief extracts that he has given. Such an odd collection of natural. history and old wives' tales, such a delightful period piece matures with age, and the defence of _science as almost capable of being turned into literature is timely. Goldsmith's recipe might well be tried again. " My intention was to treat what I considered an idle subject, in an idle manner ; and not to hedge around plain and simple narratives with hard words, accumulated distinctions, 'osten- tatious learning, and disquisitions that Produced no _convietion. Upon the appearance however of Mr. Buffon's work, I dropped my former plan, and adopted the present, being convinced by his manner, that the best imitation of the ancients was to write from our own feelings, and to imitate nature." He did not really drop the former plan: be combined the two to produce a peerless book of diversion. ADAM Fox.
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