Chapter 12

THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD."

[Sidenote: 1774--Death of Oliver Goldsmith]

In the early spring that followed upon the winter when the Mohawks of Boston made tea with salt water, at a time when politicians were busy fighting over the Boston Port Bill, and neither side dreamed of the consequences that could come of a decision, one of the gentlest and sweetest writers of the English speech passed quietly, and somewhat unhappily, away from a world he had done so much to make happy. With Oliver Goldsmith an epoch of literature came to an end, as the year that saw his death ended an epoch in the history of the world. The characteristic literature of the eighteenth century, the literature that began with Swift and Addison, and Steele and Pope; that boasted among its greatest the names of Sterne and Richardson, Smollett and Fielding, came to its close with the genius of Goldsmith. With the new conditions which were coming over the world a new literature was to be created. Wordsworth was a child of four, at Cockermouth; Coleridge was a child of four, at Bristol; over in Germany a young poet, whose name was unknown in England, had been much influenced by Goldsmith's immortal story, and was in his turn and time to have a very profound influence over the literature of Goldsmith's adopted country. The year of Goldsmith's death was the year in which the young Goethe published those "Sorrows of Werther" which marked the birth of a new form of expression in art.

Goldsmith was born in Ireland, at Pallas, in the county of Longford, in the early November of 1728. He lived for over forty-five years a life of poverty, of vagrancy, of squalor, of foolish dissipation, of grotesque vanity, of an {168} industry as amazing as his improvidence, of a native idleness that was successfully combated by a tireless industry, of an amazing simplicity that was only rivalled by his amazing genius. There were a great many contrasting and seemingly incompatible elements in Goldsmith's queer composition, but his faults were not of a kind to prevent men from finding him lovable, and, whatever his faults were, they left no stain upon his writings.

The writings of Goldsmith are distinguished in English literature, and, indeed, in the literature of the world, by their sweet pure humor, fresh and clear and sparkling as a fountain whose edges the satyr's hoof has never trampled. They charm by their humanity, by their tender charity, by the nobility of their lesson, a nobility only heightened by the intense sympathy with the struggles, and sorrows, and errors of mankind. A new St. Martin of letters, he was ever ready to share his mantle of pity with the sad and sinning. He had himself suffered so much, and been so tempted and tested, and had retained throughout his trials so much of the serenity of a child, that all his writings breathe compassion for frailty and failure with something of a schoolboy sense of brotherhood which softens even his satire. The flames of London's fiery furnace had blazed and raged about him, but he passed through them unconsumed. The age in which he lived was not an age of exalted purity, the city wherein he dwelt was scarcely saintly. He lived in some of the most evil days of the eighteenth century, but his writings and his life escaped pollution. He was not a saint, indeed; he was a spendthrift and he loved his glass, but he was never tainted with the servile sins of cities. Through all the weltering horror of Hogarth's London we seem to see him walk with something of the freshness of his boyhood still shining on his face. The reflection of the Irish skies was too bright upon his eyes to let them be dimmed by the squalor and the shame of a squalid and shameful city.

[Sidenote: 1774--The friends of Goldsmith]

With the true instinct of his fine nature he made his friends and companions among the wisest and highest of his time. His intimates and companions were Edmund {169} Burke, and Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. He had women friends too, as wisely chosen as the men--women who were kind to him and admired him, women whose kindness and admiration were worth the winning, women whose friendship brightened and soothed a life that was darkened and vexed enough. Mary Horneck and her sister were the stars of his life, his heroines, his idols, his ideals. He has made Mary Horneck immortal as the "Jessamy Bride." In his hours of poverty he was cheered by the thought of her; while he lived he worshipped her, and when he died a lock of his hair was taken from his coffin and given to her. Thackeray tells a touching little story of the Jessamy Bride. She lived long after the death of the man of genius who adored her, lived well into the nineteenth century, and "Hazlitt saw her, an old lady, but beautiful still, in Northcote's painting-room, who told the eager critic how proud she was always that Goldsmith had admired her."

Goldsmith was a companionable being and loved all company that was not vicious and depraved. He could be happy at the club in the society of the great thinkers and teachers and wits of the time. He could be more than happy at Barton, in the society of Mary and her sister. But he could be happy too, in far humbler, far less romantic fellowship. "I am fond of amusement," he declares in one of his most delightful essays, "in whatever company it is to be found, and wit, though dressed in rags, is ever pleasing to me." There was plenty of wit dressed in rags drifting about the London of that day. Men of genius slept on bulkheads and beneath arches, and starved for want of a guinea, or haunted low taverns, or paced St. James's Square all night in impecunious couples for sheer need of a lodging, cheering each other's supperless mood with political conversations and declarations that, let come what might come, they would never desert the Ministry. But Goldsmith unearthed men of genius whose names nobody ever heard of, and studied them and made merry with them, and transferred them to his pages for us to make merry with more than a century after Goldsmith {170} fell asleep. We may suspect that Goldsmith never really found those wonderful beggars he chronicles. He did not discover them as Cabot discovered America; he is their inventor, as the fancy of poets invented the Fortunate Islands.

Goldsmith's strolling player is as real as Richard Savage, with whom he is contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more presentable personage. What a jolly philosophy is his about the delights of beggary! It has all the humor of Rabelais with no touch of the Touraine grossness. It has something of the wisdom of Aurelius, only clad in homespun instead of the purple. The philosophy of contentment was never more merrily nor more whimsically expressed. A synod of sages could not formulate a scheme in praise of poverty more impressive than the contagious humor of his light-hearted merriment. The strolling player has the best of the argument, but he has it because he is speaking with the persuasive magic of the tongue of Oliver Goldsmith.

The same pervading cheerfulness, the same sunny philosophy, which is, however, by no means the philosophy of Pangloss, informs all his work. Beau Tibbs boasting in his garret; Dr. Primrose in Newgate; the good-natured man, seated between two bailiffs, and trying to converse with his heart's idol as if nothing had happened; Mr. Hardcastle, foiled for the five-hundredth time in the tale of Old Grouse in the Gun Room; each is an example of Goldsmith's method and of Goldsmith's manner. If Goldsmith did not enjoy while he lived all the admiration, all the rewards that belonged of right to his genius, the generations that have succeeded have made amends for the errors of their ancestors. "She Stoops to Conquer" is still the most successful of the stock comedies. If "The Good-Natured Man" can scarcely be said to have kept the stage, it is still the delight of the student in his closet. What satires are better known than the letters of the "Citizen of the World"? What spot on the map is more familiar than Sweet Auburn? As for the "Vicar of Wakefield," what profitable words could now be added to {171} its praise? It has conquered the world, it is dear to every country and known in every language, it has taken its place by unquestionable right with the masterpieces of all time.

[Sidenote: 1774--Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson]

"Dr. Goldsmith," said his most famous friend of the man who was then lying in the Temple earth--"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir, but he is so no more." This epitaph has been quoted a thousand times, but it must in no sense be taken as a summing-up of the dead man's career. It was a rebuke, justly administered, to the critic who at such a moment could have the heart to say that Oliver Goldsmith had been wild. Dr. Johnson, who uttered the rebuke, put the same thought even more profoundly in a letter addressed to Bennet Langton shortly after Goldsmith's death. In this letter he announces Goldsmith's death, speaks of his "folly of expense," and concludes by saying, "But let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man." These simple words are infinitely more impressive than the magniloquence of the epitaph which Johnson wrote on Goldsmith.

Goldsmith lived in London and he died in London, and he lies buried in the precincts of the Temple. The noise, and rattle, and roar of London rave daily about his grave. Around it rolls the awful music of a great city that has grown and swollen and extended its limits and multiplied its population out of all resemblance to that little London where Goldsmith lived and starved and made merry, and was loved, and dunned, and sorrowed for. The body that first drew breath among the pleasant Longford meadows, which seem to stretch in all directions to touch the sky, lies at rest within the humming, jostling, liberties of the Temple. It is perhaps fitting that the grave of one who all his life loved men and rejoiced so much in companionship should be laid in a place where the foot of man is almost always busy, where silence, when it comes at all, comes only with the night.

There is not a space in the scope of this history to deal, otherwise than incidentally, with the literature of England in the eighteenth century. The whole Georgian era, from its dawn to its dusk, is rich in splendid names in {172} letters as in art. The great inheritance from the Augustan age of Anne, the anguish of Grub Street, the evolution of the novel, the eloquence of the pulpit and the bar, the triumphs of science, the controversies of scholars, the fortunes of the drama, the speculations of philosophy, the vacillations of the pamphleteer, the judgments of the critics, the achievements of historians--these are themes whose intimate consideration is outside the range of this work's purpose. All that is possible is here and there to linger a little in the company of some dear and famous figure--a Swift, a Johnson, a Goldsmith, a Sheridan--who stands above his fellows in the world's renown or in our individual affection, who played while he lived his conspicuous part on the great stage of public life, or who helped conspicuously to influence public thought. The selection is, within these limitations, inevitably arbitrary, and is given frankly as such. Certain names assert themselves masterfully, and of these Goldsmith's is one of the most masterful. He added images to daily life and common thought as Bunyan did or Shakespeare. There is no more need to explain Dr. Primrose than there is to explain Mr. Facing-both-ways, and if Beau Tibbs is only less familiar as Osric, Tony Lumpkin is to the full as familiar as Falstaff. Goldsmith himself is the lovable type of a class that was often unlovely in the eighteenth century, the needy man of letters. If he has his lodging in the Grub Street of Dreams, his presence there brings sunlight into the squalid place, and an infinite humor, an infinite charity compensate royally for a little finite folly and finite vanity. In the great art he served and the great age he adorned Goldsmith stands, not alone, but apart, with the very human demigods.

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