His mock self-importance they thought
ill-breeding; his humorous self-depreciation and keen sense of his own
ridiculousness, mere lack of dignity and folly. It is curious to read
Boswell and watch how often Goldsmith, without Boswell's knowing it, got
the best of the joke. In writing he had what we can now recognise as
peculiarly Irish gifts. All our modern writers of light half-farcical
comedy are Irish. Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, is only the first
of a series which includes _The School for Scandal, The Importance of
being Earnest_, and _You Never can Tell_. And his essays--particularly
those of the _Citizen of the World_ with its Chinese vision of England
and English life--are the first fruit of that Irish detachment, that
ability to see "normally" English habits and institutions and foibles
which in our own day has given us the prefaces of Mr. Shaw. As a writer
Goldsmith has a lightness and delicate ease which belongs rather to the
school of the earlier eighteenth century than to his own day; the
enthusiasm of Addison for French literature which he retained gave him a
more graceful model than the "Johnsonian" school, to which he professed
himself to belong, could afford.
(3)
The eighteenth century novel demands separate treatment, and of the
other prose authors the most eminent, Edward Gibbon, belongs to
historical rather than to literary studies.
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