"How comes it," says a critic, "that in all the miry paths of life Goldsmith had lived, no speck sullied the robe of his modest and graceful Muse? How, amidst all the love of inferior company, which never to the last forsook him, did he keep his genius so free from every touch of vulgarity?" Irving answers as follows: "It was owing to the innate purity and goodness of his nature; there was nothing in it that assimilated to vice and vulgarity. His relish for humor and for the study of character brought him often into convivial company of a vulgar kind; but he discriminated between their vulgarity and their amusing qualities, or rather wrought from the whole those familiar pictures of life which form the staple of his most popular writings." Literary Achievements Goldsmith enriched three departments of literature: fiction, poetry, and the drama. See the chronological list of his works on page xix. Irving's Life of Goldsmith gives interesting anecdotes of the foundation story of She Stoops to Conquer, the selling of The Vicar of Wakefield, and the writing of Retaliation. Death The Literary Club April 4, 1774, at the age of forty-six. placed a medallion, with his likeness, in Westminster Abbey, over the south door of the Poets' Corner. An epitaph in Latin was written by Dr. Johnson, who said that "he would never disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English inscription." It reads: : OLIVARII GOLDSMITH, Poetae, Physici, Historici, Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit : Sive risus essent movendi, Sive lacrymae, Affectuum potens at lenis dominator: Amicorum fides, Lectorum veneratio, Natus in Hiberniâ, Forniae Longfordiensis, Apr. IV. MDCCLXXIV. NOTE. The date of Goldsmith's birth is incorrectly given. THE SCHOOLS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND GOLDSMITH'S PLACE IN THEM The two great schools of English literature are the classical and the romantic, connected by a period of about forty years, known as the transitional period. The study of Latin models, especially of Horace, was the keynote of the former school; the study of man and of nature was the keynote of the latter. The literature of the classical school began its development immediately after the Restoration in 1660, and the school held undisputed sway until 1740. The transitional period, from 1740 to 1780, was a period of revolt against classical standards, and of timid effort to give expression to individual and democratic feeling. This revolt and effort culminated in the romantic school, 1780–1837. The poets of the classical school, which was headed first by Dryden, and then by Pope, sought correctness and elegance of form in their work at the expense of feeling and naturalness. They gave up the various forms of verse used by the Elizabethan poets, and confined themselves almost entirely to a single form, the rhymed couplet. Restrictions as to language made poetical diction abstract and conventional. Subjects of romance and passion, which the Elizabethans had loved, were discarded for worldly themes. Nature poetry, as the romantic school understood it later, was unknown. The motto, "Follow Nature," implied the study of the morals. xiv THE SCHOOLS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE XV and manners of polite society. Thus the classical school was essentially aristocratic. But between 1740 and 1780, a strong protest against all this appeared. Poets began to reassert their right to a natural expression of their feelings and emotions, unhampered by classical rules. Revivals of blank verse and of the sonnet showed that the couplet was no longer considered the only worthy verse form. The world of nature no longer meant the world of polite society, but a world not understood by the classical school—a world of nature and of humanity, full of color, mystery, and emotion. Literature ceased to be aristocratic when its aristocratic tendency was assailed by the democratic spirit of such poets as Goldsmith and Burns. The romantic school gained even greater triumphs over form, language, and subject-matter. There was great variety of metrical forms blank verse, sonnets, odes, elegies. Diction was no longer abstract, but vividly concrete. The conventional poetic diction of the classical school was severely attacked by Wordsworth and by Coleridge. The most distinctive characteristic of the romantic school, however, was its interpretation of the motto, "Follow Nature." To this school, the motto meant a spiritual understanding of the world of Nature, a poetical effort to realize Nature as an influence toward beauty and morality. The timid expression of individual feeling seen in the transitional period had strengthened, and the great outburst of lyric poetry showed that poets were determined to follow the bent of their own emotions. During the period of transition, the aristocratic spirit of the classic school had been assailed, but now it was conquered, for the spirit of the romantic school was emphatically democratic. The poetical work of Goldsmith belongs to the transitional period, bridging the classical and the romantic schools of literature. In his work the conflict between the two schools is marked. Goldsmith, the man, preferred the romantic school, but Goldsmith, the poet, was influenced by eighteenth-century standards, standards set by the classical school. The Traveller and The Deserted Village look back to the classical school for their theme, their form, and their Latin-pastoral flavor, but look forward to the romantic school for simplicity, naturalness, emotion, sympathy, and democratic spirit. Goldsmith's theme in the two poems, "what constitutes a nation's prosperity," is typical of the classical school. He develops his theme and points his moral in the true classical manner. He revels in the rhymed couplet; he sometimes indulges in rhetorical diction; as, "No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale." The pastoral atmosphere hovers around his work. On the other hand, The Deserted Village pictures a world unknown to the classical school, the little narrow world of the village, where life is simple, natural, and happy. The human emotions of these village folk are strong enough to be felt. The picture is probably an ideal one, yet the description is full of details suggested by actual experience, which give to the whole great reality. Goldsmith's meditation upon the fate of his people, when he relates the tearful story of the wretched exiles, reveals a sympathy for man unfelt by the classical school. In |