Goldsmith
W >> William Black >> GoldsmithEnglish Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY
GOLDSMITH
BY
WILLIAM BLACK
London
MACMILLAN AND CO
1878
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
CHAPTER III.
IDLENESS, AND FOREIGN TRAVEL
CHAPTER IV.
EARLY STRUGGLES.--HACK-WRITING
CHAPTER V.
BEGINNING OF AUTHORSHIP.--THE BEE
CHAPTER VI.
PERSONAL TRAITS
CHAPTER VII.
THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.--BEAU NASH
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ARREST
CHAPTER IX.
THE TRAVELLER
CHAPTER X.
MISCELLANEOUS WRITING
CHAPTER XI.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD
CHAPTER XII.
THE GOOD-NATURED MAN
CHAPTER XIII.
GOLDSMITH IN SOCIETY
CHAPTER XIV.
THE DESERTED VILLAGE
CHAPTER XV.
OCCASIONAL WRITINGS
CHAPTER XVI.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
CHAPTER XVII.
INCREASING DIFFICULTIES.--THE END
* * * * *
GOLDSMITH
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
"Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom."
So wrote Oliver Goldsmith; and surely among those who have earned the
world's gratitude by this ministration he must be accorded a
conspicuous place. If, in these delightful writings of his, he mostly
avoids the darker problems of existence--if the mystery of the tragic
and apparently unmerited and unrequited suffering in the world is
rarely touched upon--we can pardon the omission for the sake of the
gentle optimism that would rather look on the kindly side of life.
"You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel
sings to you," says Mr. Thackeray. "Who could harm the kind vagrant
harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon save the harp on
which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and humble,
young and old, the captains in the tents, or the soldiers round the
fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he
stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty." And it is to be
suspected--it is to be hoped, at least--that the cheerfulness which
shines like sunlight through Goldsmith's writings, did not altogether
desert himself even in the most trying hours of his wayward and
troubled career. He had, with all his sensitiveness, a fine
happy-go-lucky disposition; was ready for a frolic when he had a
guinea, and, when he had none, could turn a sentence on the humorous
side of starvation; and certainly never attributed to the injustice or
neglect of society misfortunes the origin of which lay nearer home.
Of course, a very dark picture might be drawn of Goldsmith's life; and
the sufferings that he undoubtedly endured have been made a whip with
which to lash the ingratitude of a world not too quick to recognise
the claims of genius. He has been put before us, without any brighter
lights to the picture, as the most unfortunate of poor devils; the
heart-broken usher; the hack ground down by sordid booksellers; the
starving occupant of successive garrets. This is the aspect of
Goldsmith's career which naturally attracts Mr. Forster. Mr. Forster
seems to have been haunted throughout his life by the idea that
Providence had some especial spite against literary persons; and that,
in a measure to compensate them for their sad lot, society should be
very kind to them, while the Government of the day might make them
Companions of the Bath or give them posts in the Civil Service. In the
otherwise copious, thorough, and valuable _Life and Times of Oliver
Goldsmith_, we find an almost humiliating insistance on the complaint
that Oliver Goldsmith did not receive greater recognition and larger
sums of money from his contemporaries. Goldsmith is here "the poor
neglected sizar"; his "marked ill-fortune" attends him constantly; he
shares "the evil destinies of men of letters"; he was one of those who
"struggled into fame without the aid of English institutions"; in
short, "he wrote, and paid the penalty." Nay, even Christianity itself
is impeached on account of the persecution suffered by poor Goldsmith.
"There had been a Christian religion extant for seventeen-hundred and
fifty-seven years," writes Mr. Forster, "the world having been
acquainted, for even so long, with its spiritual necessities and
responsibilities; yet here, in the middle of the eighteenth century,
was the eminence ordinarily conceded to a spiritual teacher, to one of
those men who come upon the earth to lift their fellow-men above its
miry ways. He is up in a garret, writing for bread he cannot get, and
dunned for a milkscore he cannot pay." That Christianity might have
been worse employed than in paying the milkman's score is true enough,
for then the milkman would have come by his own; but that
Christianity, or the state, or society should be scolded because an
author suffers the natural consequences of his allowing his
expenditure to exceed his income, seems a little hard. And this is a
sort of writing that is peculiarly inappropriate in the case of
Goldsmith, who, if ever any man was author of his own misfortunes, may
fairly have the charge brought against him. "Men of genius," says Mr.
Forster, "can more easily starve, than the world, with safety to
itself, can continue to neglect and starve them." Perhaps so; but the
English nation, which has always had a regard and even love for
Oliver Goldsmith, that is quite peculiar in the history of literature,
and which has been glad to overlook his faults and follies, and eager
to sympathise with him in the many miseries of his career, will be
slow to believe that it is responsible for any starvation that
Goldsmith may have endured.
However, the key-note has been firmly struck, and it still vibrates.
Goldsmith was the unluckiest of mortals, the hapless victim of
circumstances. "Yielding to that united pressure of labour, penury,
and sorrow, with a frame exhausted by unremitting and ill-rewarded
drudgery, Goldsmith was indebted to the forbearance of creditors for a
peaceful burial." But what, now, if some foreigner strange to the
traditions of English literature--some Japanese student, for example,
or the New Zealander come before his time--were to go over the
ascertained facts of Goldsmith's life, and were suddenly to announce
to us, with the happy audacity of ignorance, that he, Goldsmith, was a
quite exceptionally fortunate person? "Why," he might say, "I find
that in a country where the vast majority of people are born to
labour, Oliver Goldsmith was never asked to do a stroke of work
towards the earning of his own living until he had arrived at man's
estate. All that was expected of him, as a youth and as a young man,
was that he should equip himself fully for the battle of life. He was
maintained at college until he had taken his degree. Again and again
he was furnished with funds for further study and foreign travel; and
again and again he gambled his opportunities away. The constant
kindness of his uncle only made him the best begging-letter-writer
the world has seen. In the midst of his debt and distress as a
bookseller's drudge, he receives L400 for three nights' performance of
_The Good-Natured Man_; he immediately purchases chambers in Brick
Court for L400; and forthwith begins to borrow as before. It is true
that he died owing L2000, and was indebted to the forbearance of
creditors for a peaceful burial; but it appears that during the last
seven years of his life he had been earning an annual income
equivalent to L800 of English currency.[1] He was a man liberally and
affectionately brought up, who had many relatives and many friends,
and who had the proud satisfaction--which has been denied to many men
of genius--of knowing for years before he died that his merits as a
writer had been recognised by the great bulk of his countrymen. And
yet this strange English nation is inclined to suspect that it treated
him rather badly; and Christianity is attacked because it did not pay
Goldsmith's milkscore."
[Footnote 1: The calculation is Lord Macaulay's: see his _Biographical_
_Essays_.]
Our Japanese friend may be exaggerating; but his position is after all
fairly tenable. It may at least be looked at, before entering on the
following brief _resume_ of the leading facts in Goldsmith's life, if
only to restore our equanimity. For, naturally, it is not pleasant to
think that any previous generation, however neglectful of the claims
of literary persons (as compared with the claims of such wretched
creatures as physicians, men of science, artists, engineers, and so
forth) should so cruelly have ill-treated one whom we all love now.
This inheritance of ingratitude is more than we can bear. Is it true
that Goldsmith was so harshly dealt with by those barbarian ancestors
of ours?
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE.
The Goldsmiths were of English descent; Goldsmith's father was a
Protestant clergyman in a poor little village in the county of
Longford; and when Oliver, one of several children, was born in this
village of Pallas, or Pallasmore, on the 10th November, 1728, the Rev.
Charles Goldsmith was passing rich on L40 a year. But a couple of
years later Mr. Goldsmith succeeded to a more lucrative living; and
forthwith removed his family to the village of Lissoy, in the county
of Westmeath.
Here at once our interest in the story begins: is this Lissoy the
sweet Auburn that we have known and loved since our childhood? Lord
Macaulay, with a great deal of vehemence, avers that it is not; that
there never was any such hamlet as Auburn in Ireland; that _The
Deserted Village_ is a hopelessly incongruous poem; and that
Goldsmith, in combining a description of a probably Kentish village
with a description of an Irish ejectment, "has produced something
which never was, and never will be, seen in any part of the world."
This criticism is ingenious and plausible, but it is unsound, for it
happens to overlook one of the radical facts of human nature--the
magnifying delight of the mind in what is long remembered and remote.
What was it that the imagination of Goldsmith, in his life-long
banishment, could not see when he looked back to the home of his
childhood, and his early friends, and the sports and occupations of
his youth? Lissoy was no doubt a poor enough Irish village; and
perhaps the farms were not too well cultivated; and perhaps the
village preacher, who was so dear to all the country round, had to
administer many a thrashing to a certain graceless son of his; and
perhaps Paddy Byrne was something of a pedant; and no doubt pigs ran
over the "nicely sanded floor" of the inn; and no doubt the village
statesmen occasionally indulged in a free fight. But do you think that
was the Lissoy that Goldsmith thought of in his dreary lodgings in
Fleet-Street courts? No. It was the Lissoy where the vagrant lad had
first seen the "primrose peep beneath the thorn"; where he had
listened to the mysterious call of the bittern by the unfrequented
river; it was a Lissoy still ringing with the glad laughter of young
people in the twilight hours; it was a Lissoy for ever beautiful, and
tender, and far away. The grown-up Goldsmith had not to go to any
Kentish village for a model; the familiar scenes of his youth,
regarded with all the wistfulness and longing of an exile, became
glorified enough. "If I go to the opera where Signora Colomba pours
out all the mazes of melody," he writes to Mr. Hodson, "I sit and sigh
for Lissoy's fireside, and _Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night_ from
Peggy Golden."
There was but little in the circumstances of Goldsmith's early life
likely to fit him for, or to lead him into, a literary career; in
fact, he did not take to literature until he had tried pretty nearly
everything else as a method of earning a living. If he was intended
for anything, it was no doubt his father's wish that he should enter
the Church; and he got such education as the poor Irish clergyman--who
was not a very provident person--could afford. The child Goldsmith was
first of all taught his alphabet at home, by a maid-servant, who was
also a relation of the family; then, at the age of six, he was sent to
that village school which, with its profound and learned master, he
has made familiar to all of us; and after that he was sent further
a-field for his learning, being moved from this to the other
boarding-school as the occasion demanded. Goldsmith's school-life
could not have been altogether a pleasant time for him. We hear,
indeed, of his being concerned in a good many frolics--robbing
orchards, and the like; and it is said that he attained proficiency in
the game of fives. But a shy and sensitive lad like Goldsmith, who was
eagerly desirous of being thought well of, and whose appearance only
invited the thoughtless but cruel ridicule of his schoolmates, must
have suffered a good deal. He was little, pitted with the small-pox,
and awkward; and schoolboys are amazingly frank. He was not strong
enough to thrash them into respect of him; he had no big brother to
become his champion; his pocket-money was not lavish enough to enable
him to buy over enemies or subsidise allies.
In similar circumstances it has sometimes happened that a boy
physically inferior to his companions has consoled himself by proving
his mental prowess--has scored off his failure at cricket by the
taking of prizes, and has revenged himself for a drubbing by writing a
lampoon. But even this last resource was not open to Goldsmith. He was
a dull boy; "a stupid, heavy blockhead," is Dr. Strean's phrase in
summing up the estimate formed of young Goldsmith by his
contemporaries at school. Of course, as soon as he became famous,
everybody began to hunt up recollections of his having said or done
this or that, in order to prove that there were signs of the coming
greatness. People began to remember that he had been suspected of
scribbling verses, which he burned. What schoolboy has not done the
like? We know how the biographers of great painters point out to us
that their hero early showed the bent of his mind by drawing the
figures of animals on doors and walls with a piece of chalk; as to
which it may be observed that, if every schoolboy who scribbled verses
and sketched in chalk on a brick wall, were to grow up a genius, poems
and pictures would be plentiful enough. However, there is the
apparently authenticated anecdote of young Goldsmith's turning the
tables on the fiddler at his uncle's dancing-party. The fiddler,
struck by the odd look of the boy who was capering about the room,
called out "AEsop!" whereupon Goldsmith is said to have instantly
replied,
"Our herald hath proclaimed this saying,
See AEsop dancing and his monkey playing!"
But even if this story be true, it is worth nothing as an augury; for
quickness of repartee was precisely the accomplishment which the adult
Goldsmith conspicuously lacked. Put a pen into his hand, and shut him
up in a room: then he was master of the situation--nothing could be
more incisive, polished, and easy than his playful sarcasm. But in
society any fool could get the better of him by a sudden question
followed by a horse-laugh. All through his life--even after he had
become one of the most famous of living writers--Goldsmith suffered
from want of self-confidence. He was too anxious to please. In his
eager acquiescence, he would blunder into any trap that was laid for
him. A grain or two of the stolid self-sufficiency of the blockheads
who laughed at him would not only have improved his character, but
would have considerably added to the happiness of his life.
As a natural consequence of this timidity, Goldsmith, when opportunity
served, assumed airs of magnificent importance. Every one knows the
story of the mistake on which _She Stoops to Conquer_ is founded.
Getting free at last from all the turmoil, and anxieties, and
mortifications of school-life, and returning home on a lent hack, the
released schoolboy is feeling very grand indeed. He is now sixteen,
would fain pass for a man, and has a whole golden guinea in his
pocket. And so he takes the journey very leisurely until, getting
benighted in a certain village, he asks the way to the "best house,"
and is directed by a facetious person to the house of the squire. The
squire by good luck falls in with the joke; and then we have a very
pretty comedy indeed--the impecunious schoolboy playing the part of a
fine gentleman on the strength of his solitary guinea, ordering a
bottle of wine after his supper, and inviting his landlord and his
landlord's wife and daughter to join him in the supper-room. The
contrast, in _She Stoops to Conquer_, between Marlow's embarrassed
diffidence on certain occasions and his audacious effrontery on
others, found many a parallel in the incidents of Goldsmith's own
life; and it is not improbable that the writer of the comedy was
thinking of some of his own experiences, when he made Miss Hardcastle
say to her timid suitor: "A want of courage upon some occasions
assumes the appearance of ignorance, and betrays us when we most want
to excel."
It was, perhaps, just as well that the supper, and bottle of wine, and
lodging at Squire Featherston's had not to be paid for out of the
schoolboy's guinea; for young Goldsmith was now on his way to college,
and the funds at the disposal of the Goldsmith family were not over
abundant. Goldsmith's sister having married the son of a well-to do
man, her father considered it a point of honour that she should have a
dowry: and in giving her a sum of L400 he so crippled the means of the
family, that Goldsmith had to be sent to college not as a pensioner
but as a sizar. It appears that the young gentleman's pride revolted
against this proposal; and that he was won over to consent only by the
persuasions of his uncle Contarine, who himself had been a sizar. So
Goldsmith, now in his eighteenth year, went to Dublin; managed somehow
or other--though he was the last in the list--to pass the necessary
examination; and entered upon his college career (1745.)
How he lived, and what he learned, at Trinity College, are both
largely matters of conjecture; the chief features of such record as we
have are the various means of raising a little money to which the
poor sizar had to resort; a continual quarrelling with his tutor, an
ill-conditioned brute, who baited Goldsmith and occasionally beat him;
and a chance frolic when funds were forthcoming. It was while he was
at Trinity College that his father died; so that Goldsmith was
rendered more than ever dependent on the kindness of his uncle
Contarine, who throughout seems to have taken much interest in his
odd, ungainly nephew. A loan from a friend or a visit to the
pawnbroker tided over the severer difficulties; and then from time to
time the writing of street-ballads, for which he got five shillings
a-piece at a certain repository, came in to help. It was a
happy-go-lucky, hand-to-mouth sort of existence, involving a good deal
of hardship and humiliation, but having its frolics and gaieties
notwithstanding. One of these was pretty near to putting an end to his
collegiate career altogether. He had, smarting under a public
admonition for having been concerned in a riot, taken seriously to his
studies and had competed for a scholarship. He missed the scholarship,
but gained an exhibition of the value of thirty shillings; whereupon
he collected a number of friends of both sexes in his rooms, and
proceeded to have high jinks there. In the midst of the dancing and
uproar, in comes his tutor, in such a passion that he knocks Goldsmith
down. This insult, received before his friends, was too much for the
unlucky sizar, who, the very next day, sold his books, ran away from
college, and ultimately, after having been on the verge of starvation
once or twice, made his way to Lissoy. Here his brother got hold of
him; persuaded him to go back; and the escapade was condoned somehow.
Goldsmith remained at Trinity College until he took his degree (1749.)
He was again lowest in the list; but still he had passed; and he must
have learned something. He was now twenty-one, with all the world
before him; and the question was as to how he was to employ such
knowledge as he had acquired.
CHAPTER III.
IDLENESS, AND FOREIGN TRAVEL.
But Goldsmith was not in any hurry to acquire either wealth or fame.
He had a happy knack of enjoying the present hour--especially when
there were one or two boon companions with him, and a pack of cards to
be found; and, after his return to his mother's house, he appears to
have entered upon the business of idleness with much philosophical
satisfaction. If he was not quite such an unlettered clown as he has
described in Tony Lumpkin, he had at least all Tony Lumpkin's high
spirits and love of joking and idling; and he was surrounded at the
ale-house by just such a company of admirers as used to meet at the
famous Three Pigeons. Sometimes he helped in his brother's school;
sometimes he went errands for his mother; occasionally he would sit
and meditatively play the flute--for the day was to be passed somehow;
then in the evening came the assemblage in Conway's inn, with the
glass, and the pipe, and the cards, and the uproarious jest or song.
"But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be," and the
friends of this jovial young "buckeen" began to tire of his idleness
and his recurrent visits. They gave him hints that he might set about
doing something to provide himself with a living; and the first thing
they thought of was that he should go into the Church--perhaps as a
sort of purification-house after George Conway's inn. Accordingly
Goldsmith, who appears to have been a most good-natured and compliant
youth, did make application to the Bishop of Elphin. There is some
doubt about the precise reasons which induced the Bishop to decline
Goldsmith's application, but at any rate the Church was denied the aid
of the young man's eloquence and erudition. Then he tried teaching,
and through the good offices of his uncle he obtained a tutorship
which he held for a considerable time--long enough, indeed, to enable
him to amass a sum of thirty pounds. When he quarrelled with his
patron, and once more "took the world for his pillow," as the Gaelic
stories say, he had this sum in his pocket and was possessed of a good
horse.
He started away from Ballymahon, where his mother was now living, with
some vague notion of making his fortune as casual circumstance might
direct. The expedition came to a premature end; and he returned
without the money, and on the back of a wretched animal, telling his
mother a cock-and-bull story of the most amusing simplicity. "If Uncle
Contarine believed those letters," says Mr. Thackeray, "---- if
Oliver's mother believed that story which the youth related of his
going to Cork, with the purpose of embarking for America; of his
having paid his passage-money, and having sent his kit on board; of
the anonymous captain sailing away with Oliver's valuable luggage, in
a nameless ship, never to return; if Uncle Contarine and the mother at
Ballymahon believed his stories, they must have been a very simple
pair; as it was a very simple rogue indeed who cheated them." Indeed,
if any one is anxious to fill up this hiatus in Goldsmith's life, the
best thing he can do is to discard Goldsmith's suspicious record of
his adventures, and put in its place the faithful record of the
adventures of Mr. Barry Lyndon, when that modest youth left his
mother's house and rode to Dublin, with a certain number of guineas in
his pocket. But whether Uncle Contarine believed the story or no, he
was ready to give the young gentleman another chance; and this time it
was the legal profession that was chosen. Goldsmith got fifty pounds
from his uncle, and reached Dublin. In a remarkably brief space of
time he had gambled away the fifty pounds, and was on his way back to
Ballymahon, where his mother's reception of him was not very cordial,
though his uncle forgave him, and was once more ready to start him in
life. But in what direction? Teaching, the Church, and the law had
lost their attractions for him. Well, this time it was medicine. In
fact, any sort of project was capable of drawing forth the good old
uncle's bounty. The funds were again forthcoming; Goldsmith started
for Edinburgh, and now (1752) saw Ireland for the last time.
He lived, and he informed his uncle that he studied, in Edinburgh for
a year and a half; at the end of which time it appeared to him that
his knowledge of medicine would be much improved by foreign travel.
There was Albinus, for example, "the great professor of Leyden," as he
wrote to the credulous uncle, from whom he would doubtless learn
much. When, having got another twenty pounds for travelling expenses,
he did reach Leyden (1754), he mentioned Gaubius, the chemical
professor. Gaubius is also a good name. That his intercourse with
these learned persons, and the serious nature of his studies, were not
incompatible with a little light relaxation in the way of gambling is
not impossible. On one occasion, it is said, he was so lucky that he
came to a fellow student with his pockets full of money; and was
induced to resolve never to play again--a resolution broken about as
soon as made. Of course he lost all his winnings, and more; and had to
borrow a trifling sum to get himself out of the place. Then an
incident occurs which is highly characteristic of the better side of
Goldsmith's nature. He had just got this money, and was about to leave
Leyden, when, as Mr. Forster writes, "he passed a florist's garden on
his return, and seeing some rare and high-priced flower, which his
uncle Contarine, an enthusiast in such things, had often spoken and
been in search of, he ran in without other thought than of immediate
pleasure to his kindest friend, bought a parcel of the roots, and sent
them off to Ireland." He had a guinea in his pocket when he started on
the grand tour.