nineteenth century poets like Keats and Browning. With Pope, the autocrat of the classical school, the handling was more inflexible, and his couplets and Chaucer's would hardly be recognized as written in the same form. Pope's verse exhibits almost invariably end-stopped couplets and unit lines, and he composed with a point and finish, with a correctness and with a concise and lucid phraseology that for a long time were held to be standard-giving. In Goldsmith's day emancipation was in the air; but Dr. Johnson was a firm classicist, his own verse being exclusively in Pope's manner, and Goldsmith was too good a disciple to dream of departing from the conservative vein of the artificial-conventional school. Yet in a comparison of the couplets of Goldsmith and Pope some differences may be noted. Goldsmith's lines are not less elaborated and conventional, and his diction makes no nearer approach to the fresh or the individual. Yet the glitter and point of Pope's work is more subdued with Goldsmith; and with the latter the paragraph, not the couplet, is the unit. Goldsmith's lines show, unlike Pope's, the influence of blank verse. It is, however, in the spirit of the poem, in the personal touches and descriptive passages, rather than in the form, that The Deserted Village is transitional, foreboding the departure of didactic poetry and the coming of another and freer school. Popularity of the Poem. At the time when it was written the moralizing tone of Goldsmith's poem no doubt assisted its popularity. The fashion of the age tended towards sentimental reflection; note poems like Young's Night Thoughts (1742– 1744), Akenside's The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1750), and many others. The contrast between the luxury of the rich and the innocent and simple pleasures of country folk is a theme which may still be counted upon to enlist the sympathies; moreover the subject and fitted Goldsmith personally, and his experience equipped him admirably to handle it. Others of his generation would probably have made the poem purely didactic, a sort of homily on the dangers of increasing wealth; but he chose to handle his material in a simpler and more personal way, anticipating the next generation of poets in his humanitarianism and in his return to the expression of genuine feeling, if he did not anticipate them in verse form. He is most perfunctory in the didactic passages, most natural in the feeling passages. The majority of readers soon forget the moralizing purpose of the poem, its economic theme, and remember it only as a picture of a village in its prosperity and in its desolation. Goldsmith cared much for simple rustic life, he had himself been close to it; and the poem as he wrote it springs from sincere interest and genuine sorrow. It is not the finish of the couplets or the didactic tone that gives The Deserted Village its permanent significance and accounts for the place which it has won in the popular heart rather are these derived from the grace and the tender feeling of the poem as a whole, the convincing humanity of its characterizations, and its sympathetic descriptions of village life and village scenes. THE TRAVELLER Composition and Publication. The Traveller was published December 19, 1764, six years before The Deserted Village. Its inception dates back, however, to 1755 or 1756. In the Dedication to his brother the poet tells that part of it was written during his stay in Switzerland, though just what part we shall probably never know. The completing of the poem, with various revisions and retouchings, occupied about eight years. The manuscript of The Traveller is said to have been crowded with interlineations and corrections. Goldsmith was very careful in his composition of poetry. He did not hurry into it, as with his prose hack work, but considered every line. Nor did the retouchings stop with publication. Between the original edition and the sixth, forty-four lines were omitted and thirty-six added. The title-page read: "The Traveller; or A Prospect of Society. A Poem. Inscribed to the Rev. Mr. Henry Goldsmith. By Oliver Goldsmith, M.B. London. Printed for J. Newbery, in St. Paul's Church-yard, MDCCLXV." It was published in quarto, and the price was one shilling and sixpence. The poet is said by his biographer Irving to have received twenty pounds for it from the publisher. The Traveller was the first work to which Goldsmith signed his name. This he was emboldened to do by the fact that it had the approval of Dr. Johnson, who had read the proofs and added a line here and there (see note on 1. 420). Johnson also wrote an encomium on it, when it appeared, in The Critical Review. The Traveller was immediately successful. Four editions were printed in eight months, and the number swelled to nine before the poet's death ten years later. Before its publication, Goldsmith could with difficulty get a hearing, even among his own friends, but the success of The Traveller gave him prestige at once. Plan and Purpose of the Poem. The plan of the poem is simple and striking. An English traveller sitting on an Alpine height, below which three great countries extend into the distance, views the prospect, thinks of his personal lot, and moralizes on the scenes below. He passes in review the leading characteristics and the general conditions of Italy, Switzerland, France, then of Holland and England, and reaches the conclusion that human felicity depends less on political institutions than on our own minds. Governments affect but little individual happiness, for the latter is a state of mind, available to all alike, "I have endeavoured to show," he says in the Dedication (compare also lines 75, 93, 429, etc.), " that there may be equal happiness in states that are differently governed from our own; that every state has a particular principle of happiness; and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous success." As in the case of The Deserted Village, the general lesson, or teaching, of the poem is open to question. It is hardly true that the form of government under which people live, and the happiness of the inhabitants, have little or no relation. Dr. Johnson liked to affirm, as Goldsmith does here, that one form of government is as conducive to human happiness as another; but the opportunities for individual development and for individual freedom are in too great a degree under governmental control for such a generalization to be valid. Fortunately the success of The Traveller and the pleasure to be had from reading it do not depend on the soundness of its philosophical teaching. Models. Goldsmith had no particular model for The Traveller. The poem is of a type generally liked in the mid-eighteenth century, which had marked preference for broad surveys and moralizing reflections on society and human life. The mood of gentle, melancholy meditation, the preferred mood of the time, is that of the Elegy and The Deserted Village as well. There is no spirit of revolt, no call to action; the temper is one of resignation. It is customary, however, to associate with The Traveller several compositions which may possibly have influenced Goldsmith here and there in its composition. The author plainly knew Addison's poetical Letter from Italy (1701), though there is no special debt, in general or in detail; and James Thomson's Liberty (1734-1736) and Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) have something in common with Goldsmith's poem. In fact, Thomson seems to have had some work similar to The Traveller in mind when he wrote in a private letter to a friend that "a poetical landscape of countries, mixed with moral observations on their characters and people, would not be an ill-judged undertaking "; but Thomson never carried out his purpose, nor could Goldsmith have seen his letter. Language and Versification. A characterization of the style of The Deserted Village holds for the earlier poem, The Traveller. In both, the execution of the couplets is very regular. At times Goldsmith uses trochees instead of iambs; but there are no alexandrines (i.e. lines of six feet), there are no triplets, and there are few run-over lines. As regards style, the poems show the same liking for the personification of abstract terms, for set epithets, and for words of Latin rather than vernacular origin. There was no striving in the mid-eighteenth century for the fresh epithet or the new way of saying a familiar thing, as among later generations of poets; and this should be kept in mind when Goldsmith's poems are read. The surprises, the impetuous outbursts and shifts of movement, to be met in the verse of Shelley or Keats would have shocked by their "wildness" an age that deliberately preferred smooth correctness in execution, as it preferred evenness of mood. It should be remembered, too, that the heroic couplets of the eighteenth century were meant to be read aloud. Their precise character and their lucidity give them an advantage, for oral purposes, over the freer, vaguer, though more varied, style which succeeded. Goldsmith's verse is at its best when read aloud, while the verse of many favorite poets of the next century, written for the eye almost more than for the ear, might mean little when heard for the first time. The Poem as a Whole. The human element, which forms so attractive a phase of The Deserted Village and gives the poem individuality, is faint or wanting in The Traveller. The latter, written earlier, is preoccupied mainly with abstractions and moralizings, while The Deserted Village is a cross between the poem of the generalizing type liked in the mid-eighteenth century and the concrete poem of human interest which was to |