Page:Poems, Alexander Pushkin, 1888.djvu/59

Rh 33. There is, indeed, one poet in the English language whose pages throb with sentiment, and who is moreover singularly free from that literary vice which I have called insincerity of imagination; in purity of pictures, in simplicity of sentiment, Goldsmith is unsurpassed in any tongue, but Goldsmith was not an Anglo-Saxon. And even Macaulay's great praise of "The Traveller" has not been sufficient to give it a place of authority among readers. The persons that read "The Traveller" once a year, as such a possession for all times should be read by rational readers, are very few.

34. From what I have designated as the first characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race—its rhetorical quality—springs the second, which I have designated as the superficiality of sentiment; since the rhetorician needs no depth, and when he does need it, he needs it only for the moment. And from this same rhetorical quality springs the third characteristic of English writers which appears in literature as a vice. I mean their comparative lack of the sense of form, of measuredness, literary temperance,—the want, in short, of the artistic sense. For architectural proportion, with beginning, middle, and end in proper relation, English poets have but little respect, and it is