A History of English Literature

very arbitrarily manipulated for the sake of the effects in rather
free-and-easy disregard of all principles of motivation. But the kindly
knowledge of the main forces in human nature, the unfailing sympathy, and
the irrepressible conviction that happiness depends in the last analysis on
the individual will and character make Goldsmith's writings, especially
'The Vicar,' delightful and refreshing. All in all, however, 'The Deserted
Village' is his masterpiece, with its romantic regret, verging on tragedy
but softened away from it, and its charming type characterizations, as
incisive as those of Chaucer and Dryden, but without any of Dryden's biting
satire. In the choice of the rimed couplet for 'The Traveler' and 'The
Deserted Village' the influence of pseudo-classicism and of Johnson
appears; but Goldsmith's treatment of the form, with his variety in pauses
and his simple but fervid eloquence, make it a very different thing from
the rimed couplet of either Johnson or Pope. 'The Deserted Village,' it
should be added, is not a description of any actual village, but a
generalized picture of existing conditions. Men of wealth in England and
Ireland were enlarging their sheep pastures and their hunting grounds by
buying up land and removing villages, and Goldsmith, like Sir Thomas More,
two hundred years earlier, and likewise patriots of all times, deeply
regretted the tendency.
PERCY, MACPHERSON, AND CHATTERTON. The appearance of Thomson's 'Winter' in
1726 is commonly taken as conveniently marking the beginning of the
Romantic Movement. Another of its conspicuous dates is 1765, the year of
the publication of the 'Reliques [pronounced Relics] of Ancient English
Poetry' of the enthusiastic antiquarian Thomas (later Bishop) Percy. Percy
drew from many sources, of which the most important was a manuscript
volume, in which an anonymous seventeenth century collector had copied a
large number of old poems and which Percy rescued just in the nick of time,
as the maids in the house of one of his friends were beginning to use it as
kindling for the fires. His own book consisted of something less than two
hundred very miscellaneous poems, ranging in date from the fourteenth
century to his own day. Its real importance, however, lies in the fact that
it contained a number of the old popular ballads (above, pp. 74 ff).
Neither Percy himself nor any one else in his time understood the real
nature of these ballads and their essential difference from other poetry,
and Percy sometimes tampered with the text and even filled out gaps with
stanzas of his own, whose sentimental style is ludicrously inconsistent
with the primitive vigor of the originals. But his book, which attained
great popularity, marks the beginning of the special study of the ballads
and played an important part in the revival of interest in medieval life.
Still greater interest was aroused at the time by the Ossianic poems of
James Macpherson. From 1760 to 1763 Macpherson, then a young Highland Scots
schoolmaster, published in rapid succession certain fragments of Gaelic
verse and certain more extended works in poetical English prose which, he
asserted, were part of the originals, discovered by himself, and
translations, of the poems of the legendary Scottish bard Ossian, of the
third Christian century. These productions won him substantial material
rewards in the shape of high political offices throughout the rest of his
long life. About the genuineness of the compositions, however, a violent
controversy at once arose, and Dr. Johnson was one of the skeptics who
vigorously denounced Macpherson as a shameless impostor. The general
conviction of scholars of the present day is that while Macpherson may have
found some fragments of very ancient Gaelic verse in circulation among the
Highlanders, he fabricated most of what he published. These works, however,
'Fingal' and the rest, certainly contributed to the Romantic Movement; and
they are not only unique productions, but, in small quantities, still
interesting. They can best be described as reflections of the misty scenes