SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PROSE
IGNORED by the general voice of the Eighteenth Century, championed by Coleridge, De Quincey, Ruskin, and other writers of the early or middle Nineteenth Century, Seventeenth Century prose has again suffered some eclipse as a profitable model through the more recent revulsion towards the prose of Queen Anne and her immediate successors. And now Its claims are again zealously urged by the writer of a very knowledgeable article in the Quarterly Review, whose views are sound and discerning, though we cannot say the same of his obiter dicta. What, for example, are we to think of the pronouncement that ' of all our writers of great merit, from the Restoration to the present century, Newman alone succeeded in recovering that mastery of rhythm which was the charafterlstic ' of pre-Restoratlon prose? Was there no ' mastery of rhythm ' in Ruskin, none in De Quincey — to name but two? De Quincey's rhythm was not that of the Seventeenth Century, indeed, though based on the rhvthm of the Seventeenth Century; but It was a better thing — It was characteristically and recognizably his own. Consider merely that passage in the Confessions, ending with the words * I awoke... and cried, " I will sleep no more! " ' — which for superbly marshalled complexity of strudlure and choric intricacy of sound, for mastery over the counterpoint of rhythmic prose, is perhaps the most amazing in the language. The congregating sentences throng like the assembling of armies, with growing innumerable agitation herded and precipitantly accelerated to the multitudinous crash of the close.
But the wTiter does not simply extol the prose of the Seventeenth Century for those qualities generally confessed. He seeks to show that it possessed likewise the secret of a vernacular style, available for workaday use. It has been said that the Seventeenth Century men, with all their pomps and splendours,worked out no style fit for average use; whereas the writers who underwent French influence after the Restoration did achieve this aim. To which he answers that the average style of the Restoration and the earlier Eighteenth Century was as bad as it could be. The eminent writers, most of them, were largely dominated by the Seventeenth Century — Swift, for instance, who went back to those earlier writers to get marrow for his style. It was Johnson who founded the average prose style which (in decadence enough) still sways the average man when he takes up his pen; and Johnson based himself on Sir Thomas Browne. But the tradition of a truly vernacular style had never failed from the time of Elizabeth (though the prevalent belief is that it became extin<Sl with the Seventeenth Century giants); and it could have been developed into an excellent common style but for the irruption of French influences. In tracing this vernacular current in the Seventeenth Century to which he mainly devotes his article,tlie writer fixes with acute perception on Ben Jonson as the restorer and upholder of the Tudor tradition, the popular element in the style of his dav.
The resemblance between the sturdv vernacular of Jonson and the sturdy vernacular of Dryden was not, it seems, accidental. Dryden makes express reference to the principles advocated in Jonson's Syha. And Jonson had a chain of successors. One need not, however, go further than Browne himself to show that pre-Restoration prose was not always a tissue of long periodic sentences, now unduly loose, now unduly latinized in constru6lion. Browne was more idiomatic in strufture than the Ciceronian Hooker. But the admirable knitting of his sentences was not due merely to a better study of English idiom. Ele was steeped in classic models more compafl and pregnant than Cicero. Like his French contemporaries, he was influenced by the great Latin rhetoricians, Lucan, Ovid, and Seneca; whose rivalry it was to put an idea into the fewest possible words. Lucan, Browne quotes more than any other Latin poet. His style is usually represented by passages such as the opening or closing paragraphs in the famous last chapter of the
Urn-Buridl; passages whicli combine severely logical stru6lure with a motion like the solemn winging of many seraphim. But the greater portion of that same chapter is terse and sententious, an aphoristic style. When his thought moves him to eloquent rhetoric, the sentence dispreads like a mounting pinion. But the level style is brief and serried, like this:
There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporarily considereth all things; our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.
To be nameless in worthy deeds, exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily vdthout a name than Herodias with one.
This Style is a far better foundation for a general style than the ponderous strufture which Johnson reared upon it. Nor, with all his latinities (the supposed excessive proportion of which is grossly exaggerated), was Browne to seek in the vulgar tongue. On the contrary, he blends it in his prose with an excellent mastery, as may partly be seen even in these brief extrafts.
But for direft use of the vernacular, the Ounrterly reviewer points with justice to men like Fuller, South, Chillingworth, and especially Baxter — whose vigour and plainness he com- pares to Cobbett's. He points, also, to the negleded writers of * Characters,' and, in particular, the best of them — ' Hudibras ' Butler. It is another point on which we commend his acumen. We cannot go the length of decrying Butler's verse in order to enhance his prose, as the reviewer does: we are scandalized by the assertion that Hudibras is written in ' a clever mechanical kind of verse.' But that the ' Chara£lers * are most undeserv^edly negle6led we have long held. They are witty and full of Hudibrastic point; while the style is vernacular, clear, and strong — though we vnll not add (with the reviewer) * as Swift's.' But these, and Izaak Walton, though they prove that vernacular prose was maintained in the Seventeenth Century, do not disturb the fa6l that the loftier style was in the ascendant, the style of Hooker, Bacon, Taylor, Browne, Milton. There was no Shakespeare of prose in that day, says the reviewer, who wedded and wielded both styles equally. But is a Gallic uniformity of basic style necessary or desirable in English? Does it matter what style is written by the unliterary.? Is not the wide latitude and freedom of style among the masters of modern prose, wherein each is free to follow his own affinities, a thing more precious, more suited to our^ English individualism, than the finished but after all limited perfe6lion of style which France has attained by a contrary method? We think it is. We think it better that we should bnng forth out of our treasuries new things and old, than develop on a fixed and contracting line, however perfefl: the results secured by such narrowing. Individual freedom is the English heritage, in letters as in Hfe.
GOLDSMITH'S PROSE
IN the prose style of that delightful poet and universal man of letters, Oliver Goldsmith, the man himself counts for so much that it is impossible to write of one without the other. One can trace the derivations of that style, it is true; one can discern that it owc-s much to French influence. Style does not come out of the blue, be it ever so native to the man, and however authentic his genius. But when you have recognized its Gallic derivation, that which gives it breath of life, and radiates from it in personal fascination, is Goldsmith himself — the careless Goldsmith, the much-tried Goldsmith, the sweet-natured Goldsmith, the Goldsmith who took his troubles like a happygo-lucky child: an Irish child withal, bright, emotional, and candid.
Yet all this would not have produced the inexpressibly exhilarating mixture we call Goldsmith, limpid and effervescent, touched with the simplest sentiment, enriched vv^ith the most varied experience, unfailing in dexterous grace, had this Irish child not been also a child of the eighteenth century. Into this artificial, unruffled eighteenth century, which made composure not merely an inward ideal but an external law, was borne this Celtic child, uttering himself right out with a modern sincerity, and an unconsciousness not often modern. The result, at its best, is a combina- tion of qualities sin;^ularly piquant and unrcproducible. Born into the nineteenth century with such a temperament, a Hfe so troublous and largely mangue, Goldsmith would have had the weltschmcrz pretty badly. He would have wailed the impossibility of things; he would have taken the bandage from his sores; his gaiety would have been dashed with some eclipse. Born into the eighteenth century, he had no encouragement to the indulgence of world-smart. He kept his sores under decent covering, knowing there was small sympathy for literary groans; he looked neither back nor forward, took the hour as it came, and piped against his troubles if Fate gave him half a chance. That European tour, when, half scholarly impostor, half minstrel, he alternately challenged disputants (not forthcoming) and fluted for a living, is a type of his whole career. The Irishman of that chara6ler no longer exists: and if personal dignity gains by his vanishing, the gaiety of nations suffers. No wonder that the dignifiedly Britannic, and a trifle priggish, Johnsonian circle Vv'as half scandalized by the advent amongst it of this improvident creature of Nature.
Johnson, sternly moralizing under adversity, meets Goldie piping against it, and shakes his unambrosial wig. Yet it says much for the formidable old Do6lor that he seems to have appreciated the simple, swect-naturcd genius better than did tlie rest of liis circle. It is the fashion to discredit Boswell's stories of Goldsmith on the ground of envy. Jealous they sclfevidently are, but they are too racy of the Goldsmith soil not to be true. The naif vanity is the vanity of a child. One can imagme Goldie breaking his shins in imitating a mountebank — and laugh with kindly amusement. Where talk was supremely valued, he would plunge in, sink or swim. But only that bewigged eighteenth century circle could sneer at him for the harmless weakness. He knew he had the brilliance in him, and pathetically hoped he could teach it to shine at the call of the moment. A little ugly man, slow-tongucd and unattradive to women, he sought indemnity for his maimed life in plum-coloured coats, Tokay, and the sorry loves of Covent Garden. ' Goldie was vdld, sir/ and small cause for wonder.
But all that weakness is strength in his charming prose. There was valiance, could the Do6lor have seen it, in that clear fountain of gaiety which turned all his misfortunes to brightness and favour. It is his sunny wit and sweet heart which clarifies his style; his lovable humour draws for us perpetual refreshment from the vicissitudes of a life as hard as ever fell to struggling poet. What modern writer is brave child enough to extraft sunshine from the recollection of his own darkest hours? A more admirable example you could not have of Goldsmith's prose than that exquisitely sly description of George's search for a living in the
Vicar of Wakefield. Yet small was the laughter in the experiences which furnished it to poor Goldie; and it was written when he wa? still strugghng for bread. The narrative is saturated with humour as delicate as it is buoyant, and kindly with large good nature towards the very rogues and blockheads who have set their heels on the helpless seeker for bread. The mere technique is that of a master: every sentence deftly shaped, yet easy as the song of a bird; the phrasing unobtrusively perfe6l, as we have lost the art of perfefling it in our self-conscious age. He had, indeed, the great heritage of eighteenth century prose, which a succession of masters had shaped to the purposes of wit and humour. But he had lightened it, made it nimble and touched it with an artless-seeming grace, as it never was before. This in the very day when Johnson had compelled English prose to the following of his own deep-draughted movement. Yet, by a singular stretch of blind jealousy, Boswell and others accused him of imitating the Gargantuan Doftor!
Perhaps Johnson may have had some influence on his serious and ' elevated ' style, which is antithetic and not a little rhetorical. Perhaps Johnson, also, taught him compaftness of structure and grammatical accuracy, which are invaluable even in his lightest style. But, though he ' touched nothing he did not adorn,* and was as irresistible in the pathos of poor
Olivia as in the humours of Mr JenHnson or Miss Carohna Wilhchnina Shcf^gs, it is as a comedian that one loves him best. That gay humour could pass from demure slyness to the most buoyant farce; and the combination of extravagance with the deftest delicacy is perhaps his most characteristic and felicitous achievement. Beau Tibbs, in the Citizefi of the World, is farce; but farce which nowadays would pass for comedy. But Beau Tibbs is too great to be displayed in a mere extraft; he must be read entire. Why is Goldsmith unknov/n at the present day by that delightful series of papers? If the cream of his comedy be in the plays and the Vicar, yet, for the sake of Beau Tibbs alone, the Citizen should be resuscitated. And if this inadequate article sends one fresh reader to those neglefted essays, it will not have been written uselessly.