"Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!"
About this Quote
Goldsmith objects to the way fashionable fiction flatters the eye and seduces the heart, turning beauty and happiness into fantasies that reality cannot support. When romance paints nature in more charming colors, it overruns the boundaries of truth and sets up readers for disappointment. The promise of consummate bliss is not simply a harmless dream; it breeds impatience with ordinary joys, contempt for imperfections, and a restless craving for a perfection that no human life affords. The harm lies in comparison: real affection, with its limits and compromises, looks poor beside a polished illusion, and contentment erodes into a permanent sense of lack.
The remark suits both Goldsmith’s moral temperament and his moment. Mid-18th-century fiction, from Richardson’s sentimental epics to waves of courtly romance, often cultivated exquisite feeling and improbable virtue. Goldsmith admired feeling but feared its excess. In The Vicar of Wakefield he gently mocks overrefined sensibility while praising humble domestic happiness; in his essays he sides with the tradition of Addison and Steele, which asks that literature delight without deceiving, and improve the reader without severing him from the real. His classical sense of measure resists the intoxication of idealized passion, not because love is unworthy, but because the intoxication blinds rather than clarifies.
The phrasing pits artifice against nature and exposes a paradox: the brighter the pigment, the less faithful the picture. By claiming such images are deceptive and destructive, he warns that imagination, unmoored from experience, can sour experience itself. The point still travels. Curated romances, whether in novels, films, or social media feeds, promise a frictionless happiness that daily life cannot supply. The remedy is not to banish beauty but to honor it within the grain of reality, to value durable, imperfect gladness over the mirage of perfection.
The remark suits both Goldsmith’s moral temperament and his moment. Mid-18th-century fiction, from Richardson’s sentimental epics to waves of courtly romance, often cultivated exquisite feeling and improbable virtue. Goldsmith admired feeling but feared its excess. In The Vicar of Wakefield he gently mocks overrefined sensibility while praising humble domestic happiness; in his essays he sides with the tradition of Addison and Steele, which asks that literature delight without deceiving, and improve the reader without severing him from the real. His classical sense of measure resists the intoxication of idealized passion, not because love is unworthy, but because the intoxication blinds rather than clarifies.
The phrasing pits artifice against nature and exposes a paradox: the brighter the pigment, the less faithful the picture. By claiming such images are deceptive and destructive, he warns that imagination, unmoored from experience, can sour experience itself. The point still travels. Curated romances, whether in novels, films, or social media feeds, promise a frictionless happiness that daily life cannot supply. The remedy is not to banish beauty but to honor it within the grain of reality, to value durable, imperfect gladness over the mirage of perfection.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
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