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446 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Taylor, and of Hooker, and whatever be the virility of Bunyan
and Dryden, I cannot hold that the age of mature English
prose had been reached until we come to Defoe, Swift,
Addison, Berkeley, and Goldsmith. These are the highest
types we have attained. Many good judges hold Swift to be
our Voltaire, without defect or equal. I should certainly advise
the ambitious essayist to study Swift for instruction, by
reason of the unfailing clearness, simplicity, and directness
But when we come to weigh him by the highest
of his style.
standard of all, we find Swift too uniformly pedestrian, too
dry; wanting in variety, in charm, in melody, in thunder,
and in flash. The grandest prose must be like the vault of
heaven itself, passing from the freshness of dawn to the
warmth of a serene noon, and anon breaking forth into a
crashing storm. Swift sees the sun in one uniform radiance
of cool light, but it never fills the air with warmth,
nor does it ever light the welkin with fire. 10
Addison, with all his mastery of tone, seems afraid to give
his spirit rein. 77 s'ecoute quand il parle : and this, by the way,
is the favorite sin of our best moderns. We see him pause
at the end of each felicitous sentence to ask himself if he has
satisfied all the canons as to propriety of diction. Even in the
Spectator we never altogether forget the author of Cato. Now,
we perceive no canons of good taste, no tragic buskin, no
laborious modulations in the Vicar o] Wakefield, which in its
own vein is the most perfect type of eighteenth-century prose.
Dear old Goldie ! There is ease, pellucid simplicity, wit,
pathos. I doubt if
English prose has ever gone further, or
will go further or higher.
After all I have said, I need not labor the grounds on
which I feel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle
to be far from perfect as writers and positively fatal if taken
as models. Old Samuel's Ciceronian pomp has actually