Part 12

But, of course, the most widely recognised form of Irish humour is that known as the “bull.” This is the delivery of a paradox so obvious as to be detected--after a brief consideration--by an Englishman or even--after an additional space for thought--by a Scotsman. But where the fun comes in is (in the Irishman's eyes) when the others assume that the humour of the bull is involuntary; and this is just what the Englishman has been doing, and what the Irishman has been encouraging him to do, for centuries. The Englishman is so busy trying to make it appear that he is cleverer than he really is, he cannot see the humour of any man trying to make out that he is more stupid than he really is. Let no one fancy for a moment that the humour of an Irish bull is involuntary. It is a form of expression that may be due to a peculiar twist in the Irishman's mind--indeed, every form of humour may be said to be due to a peculiar twist of the mind--but it is as much a figure of speech as irony or satire. “Blarney” and “palaver” are other forms of speech in which the Irish of some generations ago indulged with great freedom, and both are essentially Irish and essentially humorous, though occasionally borrowed and clumsily worn on the other side of the Channel, just as the bernous of the Moor is worn by an English missionary when lecturing in the village schoolroom (with a magic-lantern) on The Progress of Christianity in Morocco.

It would be interesting to make a scientific inquiry into the origin and the maintenance of all these forms of expression among the Irish; but it is unnecessary to do so in this place. It is enough if we remind English readers of the existence of such forms even in the present day, when there is so little need for their display. It can without difficulty be understood by any one, however superficially acquainted with the history of Ireland for the past thousand years, that “blarney” and “palaver” were as necessary to the existence of the natives of the island as suspicion and vigilance were to the existence of the invaders. But it is not so apparent why Irishmen should be given to rush into the extremes of bragging on the one hand, and self-depreciation on the other. Bragging is, however, as much an endowment of Nature for the protection of a species or a race as is imitation or mimicry. The Irishman who was able by the exercise of this gift to intimidate the invaders, escaped a violent death and transmitted his art to his children. The practice of the art of self-depreciation was quite as necessary for the existence of the Irish race up to the time of the passing of the first Land Act. For several generations an Irishman was not allowed to own a horse of greater value than five pounds; and every Irish agriculturist who improved the miserable cabin which he was supposed to share with his pigs and his fowl, might rest certain that his rent would be raised out of all proportion to his improvements. In these circumstances it can easily be understood that it was accounted a successful joke for a man who was doing tolerably well to put on a poor face when in the presence of an inquiry agent of the absent landlord--to run down all his own efforts and to depreciate generally his holding, and thus to save himself from the despicable treatment which was meted out to the unfortunate people by the conquerors of their country.

It is not necessary to do more than make these suggestions to a scientific investigator who may be disposed to devote some time to the question of the origin of certain forms of Irish humour; it is enough for us, in considering the mystery of that typical Irishman, Oliver Goldsmith, to know that such forms of humour as we have specified have an actual existence. Such knowledge is a powerful illuminant to a reader of Boswell's and Beattie's stories of the stupidity of Goldsmith. A fine flood of light is thrown upon the apparent mystery of the inspiration of this idiot--of this man “who wrote like an angel and talked like poor poll.”

Goldsmith was just too successful in maintaining that gravity which is the very essence of those forms of humour in which he was constantly indulging for his own satisfaction; the mask of gravity was such a good fit that the short-sighted people who were around him never penetrated it. He was making fools of the people about him, never giving a thought to the possibility that they would transmit to posterity the impression which his attitude conveyed to them, which was that he was a shallow fool.

Of course, it would be as absurd to contend that Goldsmith never made a fool of himself as it would be to assume that Johnson never made a fool of himself, or that Boswell ever failed to do so. The occasions upon which he made himself ridiculous must have been numerous, but out of the many incidents which Boswell and Beattie and Cooke and the others bring forward as proofs of his stupidity there are few that will not bear to be interpreted as instances of his practice of a form of humour well known in Ireland. If his affectation of chagrin at the admiration given to the Panton Street puppets, followed by the boast, “I could do it as well myself,” was not humorous, then indeed there is nothing humorous under the sun. If his object of setting the room roaring with laughter was not achieved the night when at the club he protested that the oratory of Burke was nothing--that all oratory, as a matter of fact, was only a knack--and forthwith stood upon a chair and began to stutter, all that can be said is that the famous club at Gerrard Street was more stolid than could be believed. If his strutting about the room where he and his friends were awaiting a late-comer to dinner, entreating Johnson and the rest to pay particular attention to the cut of his new peach-bloom coat, and declaring that Filby, his tailor, had told him that when any one asked him who had made the garment he was not to forget Filby's address, did not help materially to enliven the tedium of that annoying wait, all that can be said is that Thrale, as well as Boswell, must have been of the party.

If a novelist, anxious to depict a typical humorous Irishman, were to show his hero acting as Boswell says Goldsmith acted, would not every reader acknowledge that he was true to the character of a comical Irishman? If a playwriter were to put the scene on the stage, would any one in the audience fail to see that the Goldsmith of the piece was fooling? Every one in the club--Boswell best of all--was aware of the fact that Goldsmith had the keenest admiration for Burke, and that he would be the last man in the world to decry his powers. As for the peach-bloom coat, it had been the butt of much jesting on the part of his friends; the elder of the Miss Hornecks had written him a letter of pretty “chaff” about it, all of which he took in good part. He may have bought the coat originally because he liked the tint of the velvet; but assuredly when he found that it could be made the subject of a jest he did not hesitate to jest upon it himself. How many times have we not seen in Ireland a man behave in exactly the same way under similar conditions--a boisterous young huntsman who had put on pink for the first time, and was strutting with much pride before an admiring group of servants, every one of whom had some enthusiastic remark to make about the fit of the coat, until at last the youth, pointing out the perfection of the gilt buttons, murmured: “Oh, but isn't this a great day for Ireland!”

What a pity it was that Mr. Boswell had not been present at such a scene! Can we not hear his comments upon the character of the young man who had actually been so carried away by his vanity that he was heard to express the opinion that the fortunes of his country would be materially affected by the fact of the buttons of his new coat being gilt? (It was this same Mr. Boswell, the critic of Goldsmith's all too attractive costume, who, when going to see Pitt for the first time, put on Corsican native dress, pretending that he did so in order to interest Pitt in General Paoli.)

In reading these accounts of Goldsmith's ways and the remarks of his associates it must be noticed that some of these gentlemen had now and again an uneasy impression that there was more in the poet's stupidity than met the eye. Sir Joshua Reynolds was his closest friend, and it was the business of the painter to endeavour to get below the surface of his sitters. The general idea that prevails in the world is that he was rather successful in his attempts to reproduce, not merely their features, but their characters as well; and Sir Joshua saw enough beneath the rude exterior of the man to cause him to feel toward Goldsmith as he felt for none of his other friends. When the news of his death was brought to the painter, he laid down his brushes and spent the day in seclusion. When it is remembered that he spent every day of the week, not even excepting Sunday, in his studio, the depth of his grief for the loss of his friend will be understood. Upon more than one occasion Reynolds asserted that Goldsmith was diverting himself by trying to make himself out to be more stupid than he really was. Malone, whose judgment was rarely at fault, whether it was exercised in the detection of fraud or in the discovery of genius, was in perfect agreement with Reynolds on this point, and was always ready to affirm that Boswell was unjust in his remarks upon Goldsmith and the conclusions to which he came in respect of his character. It is not necessary for one to have an especially vivid imagination to enable one to see what was the expression on Malone's face when he came upon the patronising passage in the _Life of Johnson_ in which Boswell stated that for his part he was always glad to hear “honest Dr. Goldsmith” converse. “Puppy!” cried Johnson upon one occasion when a certain commentator had patronised a text out of all recognition. What would he have said had he heard Goldsmith patronised by Boswell?

So far as Goldsmith's actual vanity is concerned, all that can be said at this time is that had it existed in the offensive form which it assumes in some of Boswell's stories, Goldsmith would never have won the friendship of those men and women who were his friends before he had made a reputation for himself by the publication of _The 'Traveller_. If he had had an extravagant opinion of his own capacity as a poet, he would certainly never have suffered Johnson to make an attempt to improve upon one of his poems; but Goldsmith not only allowed him to do so, but actually included the lines written by Johnson when he published the poem. Had he been eaten up by vanity, he would not have gone wandering down the Mall in St. James's Park while his comedy was being played for the first time before a delighted house. The really vain man was the author of The Vanity of Human Wishes, who bought the showiest set of garments he could find and sat in all their glory in the front row of the boxes on the night when Garrick produced his tragedy of _Irene_--Garrick whom he kept out of the Club for nine years simply because the actor had expressed a wish to become one of the original members. The really vain man was the one who made his stock story his account of his conversation with the King in the Royal Library. Every one sees this now, and every one saw it, except Boswell, when the _Life_ was flung in the face of a convulsed public, for the public of the year 1791 were as little aware of the real value of the book as the author was of the true character of his hero and his hero's friend Goldsmith.

After all, there would be no better way of arriving at a just conclusion on the subject of Goldsmith's stupidity than by submitting the whole of the case to an ordinary man accustomed to the many peculiarities of Irishmen, especially in the exercise of their doubtful gift of humour. “Here is a man,” we must say, “who became the most intimate friend of people of title and the dearest friend of many men of brains. When the most exclusive Club of the day was started his place as a member was not disputed, even by the man who invented the word 'clubbable,' and knew what it meant into the bargain; when the Royal Academy of Arts was started he was invited to become one of its professors. Some of the wittiest things recorded by the most diligent recorder of witty things that the world has ever known, were uttered by him. Upon one occasion when walking among the busts of the poets in Westminster Abbey with a friend, the latter pointing around said:

“'_Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis_.'

“Leaving the Abbey and walking down the Strand to Temple Bar they saw the heads of the men who had been captured and decapitated for taking part in the Rebellion of the year 1745, bleaching in the winds in accordance with the terms of the sentence for high treason.

“'_Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis_,' murmured the man of whom we speak. Upon another occasion this same friend of his, who had a unique reputation for speaking in the most ponderous language, even when dealing with the simplest matters, asserted that the writing of the dialogue in some recently published fables where fish were represented as conversing, was very simple. 'Not so simple at all,' said the other, 'for were you to write them, you would make every minnow talk like a whale.'

“In the course of a few years, in addition to compiling histories, which remained standard educational works for more than a century, and several other books, he wrote a novel which received the highest praise from the greatest intellects in Europe, and which is still read with delight by thousands of people of all nationalities; a poem of which almost every line is quoted daily in conversation--a poem which contains metaphors that have been repeated for generations in the Senate, in the Court of Law, and in the Church; and a play which has been pronounced the truest comedy in the English language. He died at an early age, and a memorial of his genius was given a place in Westminster Abbey. The inscription was written by the most distinguished man of letters in England, and although highly eulogistic, was considered by the greatest painter in the world and the greatest orator in the world to fall short of doing justice to the subject.

“But, on the other hand, the man of whom we speak was said by a Scotchman, who himself was occasionally referred to as a cur and sometimes as an ape, and more than once as a coxcomb, to have been roused to a frenzy of envy, because some officers, passing through a square in a French town, looked admiringly at two lovely girls who were at a window, ignoring him at another window; and again because his friends spoke with favour of the dexterity of a wooden figure dressed as a soldier, and yet again (on another authority) because one of his friends read a passage from Shakespeare, and affirmed that it was magnificent. Now, would you say,” we should ask the authority to whom we are supposed to be stating a case--“would you say that this man was in earnest when, in the first of the instances quoted, he walked up and down the room in the French hotel asserting 'that although the young ladies, of whom he was extremely fond, might have their admirers, there were places where he, too, was given admiration'? Would you say that he showed ill-temper or wit when, in the second instance, he declared with warmth that he could toss a halbert quite as well as any wooden figure? Would you say that----”

But we should not get any further than this in stating our case to a man acquainted with the Irish and their humour: he would think that we were taking a leaf out of the book of Irish humour, and endeavouring to fool him by asking him to pronounce a grave opinion upon the obvious; he would not stay to give us a chance of asking him whether he thought that the temptation of making “Noll” rhyme with “Poll,” was not too great to be resisted by the greatest farceur of his time, in the presence of a humorous colleague called Oliver; and whether an impecunious but witty Irishman begged his greatest friend not to give him the nickname of Goldy, because his dignity was hurt thereby, or simply because it was tantalising for one to be called “Goldy,” whose connection with gold was usually so transitory.

If people will only read the stories told of poor Goldsmith's vanity, and envy, and coxcombry, with a handbook of Irish humour beside them, the conclusion to which they will come must, we think, be that Goldsmith was an Irishman, and that, on the whole, he made very good fun of Boswell, who was a Scotsman, but that in the long run Boswell got very much the better of him. Scotsmen usually laugh last.

THE BEST COMEDY OF THE CENTURY

HE occupied one room in the farmhouse--the guest-chamber it had probably been called when the farm was young. It was a pretty spacious apartment up one pair of stairs and to the right of the landing, and from its window there was a pleasing prospect of a paddock with wheat-fields beyond; there was a drop in the landscape in the direction of Hendon, and here was a little wood. The farmer's name was Selby, a married man with a son of sixteen, and younger children, and the farmhouse was the nearest building to the sixth milestone on the Edgware Road in the year 1771.

He was invariably alluded to as “The Gentleman,” and the name did very well for him, situated as he was in the country; in the town and among his acquaintances it would serve badly as a means of identification. He was never referred to as “The Gentleman” of his circle. In his room in the farmhouse there was his bed and table--a large table littered with books; it took two chaises to carry his books hither from his rooms in the Temple. Here he sat and wrote the greater part of the day, and when he was very busy he would scarcely be able to touch the meals which were sent up to him from the kitchen. But he was by no means that dignified type of the man of letters who would shrink from fellowship with the farmer or his family. He would frequently come down his stairs into the kitchen and stand with his back to the fire, conversing with the housewife, and offering her his sympathy when she had made him aware of the fact that the privilege of being the wife of a substantial farmer, though undoubtedly fully recognised by the world, carried many troubles in its train, not only in connection with the vicissitudes of churning, but in regard to the feeding of the calves, which no man could attend to properly, and the making of the damson and cowslip wine. He told her that the best maker of cowslip wine whom he had ever met was a Mrs. Primrose; her husband had at one time occupied the Vicarage of Wakefield--he wondered if Mrs. Selby had ever heard of her. Mrs. Selby's knowledge did not go so far, but she thought that Mrs. Primrose's recipe must be a good one indeed if it brought forth better results than her own; and the gentleman said that although he had never tasted Mrs. Selby's he would still have no hesitation in backing it for flavour, body, headiness, and all other qualities associated with the distillation of the cowslip, against the Primrose brand.

And then he would stare at the gammon in the rafter and mutter some words, burst into a roar of laughter, and stumble upstairs to his writing, leaving the good woman to thank Heaven that she was the wife of a substantial farmer and not of an unsubstantial gentleman of letters, who could not carry on a simple conversation without having some queer thought fly across his brain for all the world like one of the swallows on the water at Hendon, only maybe a deal harder to catch. She knew that the gentleman had hurried to his paper and ink to complete the capture of that fleet-flitting thought which had come to him when he had cast his eyes toward the gammon, though how an idea worth putting on paper--after a few muttered words and a laugh--could lurk about a common piece of hog's-flesh was a mystery to her.

And then upon occasions the gentleman would take a walk abroad; the farmer's son had more than once come upon him strolling about the fields with his hands in his pockets and his head bent toward the ground, still muttering fitfully and occasionally giving a laugh that made the grey pad in the paddock look up slowly, still munching the grass. Now and again he paid a visit to his friend Mr. Hugh Boyd at the village of Kenton, and once he returned late at night from such a visit, without his shoes. He had left them in a quagmire, he said, and it was only with a struggle that he saved himself from being engulfed as well. That was the story of his shoes which young Selby remembered when he was no longer young. And there was another story which he remembered, but it related to his slippers. The fact was that the gentleman had acquired the bad habit of reading in bed, and the table on which his candlestick stood being several feet away from his pillow, he saved himself the trouble of rising to extinguish it by flinging a slipper at it. In the morning the overturned candle was usually found side by side on the floor with an unaccountably greasy slipper. This method of discharging an important domestic duty differed considerably from Johnson's way of compassing the same end. Johnson, being extremely short-sighted, was compelled to hold the candle close to the book when reading in bed, so that he had no need to use his slipper as an extinguisher. No, but he found his pillow very handy for this purpose. When he had finished his reading he threw away the book and went asleep with his candle under his pillow.

The gentleman at the farm went about a good deal in his slippers, and with his shirt loose at the collar--the latter must have been but one of his very customary negligences, or Sir Joshua Reynolds would not have painted him thus. Doubtless the painter had for long recognised the interpretative value of this loosened collar above that of the velvet and silk raiment in which the man sometimes appeared before the wondering eyes of his friends.

But if the painter had never had an opportunity of studying the picturesqueness of his negligence, he had more than one chance of doing so within the farmhouse.

Young Selby recollected that upon at least one occasion Sir Joshua, his friend Sir William Chambers, and Dr. Johnson had paid a visit to the gentleman who lodged at the farm. He remembered that for that reception of so distinguished a company the farmhouse parlour had been opened and tea provided. There must have been a good deal of pleasant talk between the gentleman and his friends at this time, and probably young Selby heard an astonishingly loud laugh coming from the enormous visitor with the brown coat and the worsted stockings, as the gentleman endeavoured to tell his guests something of the strange scenes which he was introducing in the comedy he was writing in that room upstairs. It was then a comedy without a name, but young Selby heard that it was produced the following year in London and that it was called _She Stoops to Conquer_.

This was the second year that the gentleman had spent at the farm. The previous summer he had been engaged on another work which was certainly as comical as the comedy. It was called _Animated Nature_, and it comprised some of the most charmingly narrated errors in Natural History ever offered to the public, and the public have always been delighted to read pages of fiction if it is only called “Natural History.” This is one of the best-established facts in the history of the race. After all, _Animated Nature_ was true to half its title: every page was animated.