Part 8

In mixed society he seemed very unequal. He very often sat silent, and the shyness of his disposition was thought to be an affectation of dignity. But when the occasion grew more festive, as at after-dinner times, and the poet’s temperament had received the stimulus of aliment and wine, he would overflow with pleasant paradoxes, jests and all sorts of unguarded hilarity, believing that those about him who were aware of the intrinsic wit and worth of his intellect, would justify him against any thought of ridicule or disparagement. In such moods, and before the most fastidious wits of the day, he would come out intrepidly with—“When I used to lodge among the beggars in Axe Lane.” The effect of this on his hearers (we believe it was spoken at one of Sir Joshua Reynold’s dinners) was something like that produced on the discomposed sovereigns sitting round the table at Tilsit, or Erfurth—we forget which—by Napoleon’s reminiscence, beginning—“When I was a lieutenant in the regiment of La Fere!” These sayings seem to show a kindred consciousness of something beyond the conventions of rank and name. Goldsmith was not to be laughed at for that sally—which Socrates or Zeno would have enjoyed very much. But the cankered and fastidious Walpole, who was present on some such occasion, and found the Irishman very blunt in his mode of argument, and very unconcerned at the rank or pretensions of Walpole himself, could not tolerate such franknesses, and with his usual affectation of point, called Oliver “an inspired idiot;” just as Chesterfield had called Johnson “a respectable Hottentot”—but indeed with greater justice; for the moralist’s manners at table, particularly his modes of eating, were rather savage.

Goldsmith was certainly apt to blunder. But it was when in the simple frankness of his nature he thought he was among friends and good fellows in such moods and moments. He put his trust in those whose conventionalities he would offend, and who must have felt the inferiority of their own powers when in contact with his. Disraeli, the elder, has made some just remarks on the wrong to which such men expose themselves very often in society. He says: “One peculiar trait in the conversation of men of genius which has often injured them when listeners are not acquainted with the men—are certain sports of a vacant mind; a sudden impulse to throw out opinions and take views of things in some humor of the moment. Extravagant paradoxes and false opinions are caught up by the humblest prosers: and the Philistines are thus enabled to triumph over the strong and gifted man, because in an hour of confidence and the abandonment of his mind, he laid his head in their lap and taught them how he might be shorn of his strength.” All this is extremely applicable to the case of Oliver Goldsmith.

Almost all the stories told of him to show his absurdity or jealousy are palpably false and must be looked on as failures. Northcote very gravely set down how the doctor was offended, when on his route to Paris, accompanied by Mrs. Horneck and her daughters, to find the young ladies receive more notice and admiration than he himself at a French hotel. This was a stupid misconception, to say the least of it—as Miss Horneck afterward stated, wondering at the same time how such could ever have arisen from the fact. Goldsmith, who was always ready to laugh at himself, for the pleasantry of the thing, in any of his playful moods, seeing his companions pleased by the admiration they excited, and wishing to amuse them, said, with an affectation of wounded self-love, that doubtless produced the effect he intended—“Very well, ladies; you may find somebody else in vogue, very shortly, as well as yourselves.” Such sallies furnish a key to most of those things cited to the ridicule of Goldsmith. Another story is told by Col. O’Moore. Burke and O’Moore going to the club to dine, saw Oliver among others looking at some foreign women in a balcony in Leicester Square. Arrived at the club, Burke affected to be offended with Goldsmith and being questioned, said he could hardly think of being friendly with a man who could say what the doctor had just uttered in the public street. Goldsmith eagerly asking to know what it was, was told he expressed surprise that the crowd should look at these women, while he, a man of genius, was passing by!

“Surely, I did not say so,” says Oliver.

“How should I know it then?” replies Burke.

“True,” admits Goldsmith, “I thought, indeed, something of the kind; but I did not think I uttered it.”

All this is merely clumsy and incredible—just the sort of anecdote for the colonel to tell. Just as preposterous was the story of Goldsmith asking Gibbon, who came into his room while he was writing the History of Greece, “What king was that who gave Alexander so much trouble in India?” and on being informed it was Montezuma, writing it down at once! Then, there is Beauclerc’s funny thing—how Goldsmith, being once conversing with Lord Shelburne (termed “Malagrida” by some political opponent,) told his lordship he wondered they called him Malagrida, _for_ Malagrida was an honest man! Such were the false and stupid reminiscences that went to compose the memory of poor Goldsmith—a man of the finest perceptions and most excellent judgment.

Exaggerated stories are also told of his love of dress and his personal vanity in other matters. His peach-colored coat is thought to be a good jest. It is indeed true, that he was somewhat expensive in dress; but a man who frequented the politest society of the time was obliged to pay attention to his wardrobe. And if his taste in the matter of coats and cocked-hats was not so true as it ever was in literary matters, it may be stated that Aristotle also underwent the rebuke of Plato for his foppishness. A great deal is made of the fact that Goldsmith once attempted to leap from the bank to a little island in a pond, at Versailles, and fell into the water. This is all natural enough, if we refer it to his usual playfulness and the remembrance of the active habits of his youth. It amounts to no more than the gravest man may have to answer for, if all his doings were chronicled. Johnson, when quite an old man, used to make such heavy attempts to be lively. Mrs. Thrale (we believe) says that one day, approaching her house, the philosopher flung himself in sport over a gate that lay in his way, and was very much elated by his own agility.

With all his dignity and philosophy Johnson felt a little jealous of Goldsmith, at times, and used to express disparaging opinions of him. He said—“His genius is great, but his knowledge is small. As they say of a generous man—it is a pity he is not rich; so we may say of Goldsmith—it is a pity he is not knowing.” He also said no one was more foolish than Goldsmith when he had not a pen in his hand, or wiser when he had, thus parodying the saying applied to Charles the Second—

“Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one.”

In expressing these opinions, Dr. Johnson seems to forget what he himself has elsewhere said, very justly—to the effect that a great deal of the truth and correctness of a sentiment is sacrificed to the point of it. He also says, amusingly enough—“Goldsmith should not be always attempting to shine in conversation,” (certainly not—this would be a sort of contumacy in Johnson’s presence!) “he has not temper for it.” (Johnson’s own was of such a meek, philosophic stamp!) Even when the dignity of Goldsmith’s doings was more questionable than that of his sayings or writings, the doctor could not help entertaining some little pique. When Oliver had chastised Evans, the publisher, for printing some offensive observations, Johnson remarked to his _fidus Achates_: “Why, sir, this is the first time he _has_ beaten; he may have _been_ beaten before. This is a new pleasure to him.” He alluded to a white-bait dinner at Blackwall, where Goldsmith, denouncing obscene novels and the indelicacies of Tristram Shandy, created a warm argument among the feasters, whence they fell into personalities; then into an uproar, and thence to fisticuffs, in the midst of which, it is said, Oliver got a smart share of what was going—before they broke up this feast of reason—pretty fairly expressed by the _Irish_ participles, _bait_, beating, beaten! The affair was very laughable, to be sure. But Johnson should have remembered that he himself had knocked his own publisher down—Osborne. He should have commented more leniently on poor Goldie. The old feuds between authors and publishers were as lively in those times as they were before or have been since. Goldsmith wrote a very dignified public letter, to justify the beating, and showed that there were certain rascalities which called for the imposition of violent hands upon them, and that the punishment of them was sanctioned by the sense of society, though against the letter of the law. But, as we were saying, Johnson permitted himself on many occasions to disparage Goldsmith. Still, in the main, he has stood up strongly for the fame of his friend—thereby showing that such opinions as the foregoing were not very just or generous. When his conscience got the better of his occasional feelings, as was usually the case—for his nature was intrinsically good (he “had nothing of the bear but the skin,” as Goldsmith used to say,) he would do Oliver justice. In this, to be sure, he had a consoling sense of the superiority and patronage which belong to such a championship; and, in maintaining the cause of his friend, he could argue vigorously for himself—for, their fortunes were very much alike. He could express his own feelings of scorn for the conventions or misconceptions of society, in defending the character of a man of genius. Be this as it may, he has left on record sentiments highly honorable to himself as well as to Goldsmith; and has had some of them graven in his epitaph on the poet, dramatist and historian

“Who ran Through each mode of the pen and was master of all.”

Goldsmith, in society, was not the oddity he is represented to be by Boswell, Walpole and the others. There is no such contradictory monster as they would have us think him. The man who was “inspired” with such true genius—who drew the Vicar of Wakefield—could not have been the “idiot” that the artificial Walpole would depict him. Nor could any man who “wrote like an angel” ever come to “talk like poor Poll,” as Garrick says with such antithetical fallacy. The fact was, Oliver’s broad Westmeath accent, his stammering mode of speaking, and the careless impulses of his thoroughly Irish temperament gave his manners a strange, it may be said an intolerable originality, in an age of forms and observances in literature and life. It was only in a stiff, artificial age, like that in which his lot was cast, that Goldsmith would have been so rudely treated and ridiculed. It is felt that it was not Julian but the polished Antiochans which were ridiculous. We also know that though they laughed at Socrates he was not _laughed at_, as he himself expresses it. Absurdity was the cant word of Goldsmith’s day for the good-nature, generosity, originality and independence which he brought with him, along with that _Shibboleth_ of his from the simple and honorable home of his childhood, and which he never lost in all the mazes and trials of the great metropolis.

His absurdities, as they termed them, did not, after all, prevent Goldsmith from being well received in the best society of London—a very strong proof, in itself, that the doctor was as much a gentleman in demeanor as he was by his birth and education, and could mingle with the polite and the fashionable on very easy terms and without any violence to his habits. His sayings in company—such as have been remembered—are full of point and pleasantry, and show that he could command, even with his shy utterance, much of the happy spirit of his written style. He was once explaining to a friend, in Johnson’s presence, that in fables where inferior creatures are interlocutors, these should be made to speak in character—that animals on land, for instance, should converse differently from little fishes. This idea, which is, after all, only that which Shakspeare has so beautifully realized, with a difference, in his elves of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, his Caliban and his Ariel, set Johnson a-chuckling at its childishness, which Goldsmith perceiving, he retorted very happily—laughing, too—“You may laugh, doctor, but if _you_ had to make little fishes speak, they would talk like whales!” A palpable hit at the sesquipedalian moralist.

If we come to consider Goldsmith’s influence upon the literary character of his age, we will probably agree that it was second to that of no other author. Indeed, it must be considered superior to that of him who was supposed to sway most authoritatively the world of letters. Doctor Johnson’s style, to be sure, was very impressive, and created a host of imitators—the most remarkable of whom was Gibbon, who surpassed his model in a certain measured splendor of rhetoric—which is, nevertheless, very wearisome at times. But Goldsmith’s many modes of a very simple and lucid style produced then, and since, a more permanent effect. He wrote the best poem, the best comedy, the best novel, and the best history—at least, the best written history of the day. Johnson preferred his historic manner to that of Hume or Robertson. Though Goldsmith’s literature had not the marked effect of Doctor Johnson’s grand Latin idiom; yet being more varied, it reached the wider popularity, such as time has confirmed and increased. Goldsmith kept to the ancient ways of the vernacular, trod by Addison, Swift, Hume, etc.; and contributed not a little to neutralize the Johnsonian mode—which, after all, was recognized to be a corrupt rhetoric, and a weakening of the genius of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. Goldsmith’s, “racy of the soil,” was secured against fluctuations of taste, and the charm of it is as fresh to-day as it was eighty years ago. His comedies abolished the mawkish sentimentality which—derived partly from the Richardson school—dulled the spirit of the stage, and asserted, very happily, the old comic claim of setting audiences in a roar. The change was heartily welcomed; the Londoners crowded to the comedy to be merry, and a respected household tradition, now especially recalled for the sake of the dear old narrator of it, has more than once informed us how George the Third, his fresh-colored English face, full of merriment, and the plain, little cock-nosed Charlotte by his side, in the royal box, both joined in the hilarity of the audience during one of the first performances of “She Stoops to Conquer,” at Covent Garden Theatre; but, at the story of “Old Grouse in the Gun-room,” where everybody laughed on the stage, his majesty fairly chimed in with Mr. Hardcastle, and laughed as loud as any one in the house. Thus, in the words of Mr. Colman—

“Thus, cheered, at length, by Pleasantry’s bright ray, Nature and mirth resumed their legal sway, And Goldsmith’s genius basked in open day.”

Goldsmith’s prose is the sweetest and most harmonious in the language. His narrative and historical manner is easy and expressive—more so than Hume’s. And here, we may remark how odd it was to see a pair of provincials—an Irishman and a Scotchman, each with the brogue or the burr upon his tongue, and in his manner—vindicating the native purity of the Anglo-Saxon against the subversive genius of two of the foremost English writers—Johnson and Gibbon—and finally overcoming them on their own ground. Goldsmith, in short, as Johnson said very well, ornamented whatever he touched, and some of the dryest disquisitions become in his hands as interesting as a Persian tale. An honor of another kind belongs to Goldsmith.

Among the authors of England none did more than himself to support the dignity and independence of British authorship, the honor of which was so sadly smirched by the dedications of Dryden and Locke, as well as by others before and after them. Oliver instead of thinking of the high nobility, set a fine example to all writers—he dedicated “She Stoops to Conquer,” to Doctor Johnson; “The Deserted Village” to his other friend, Reynolds; and “The Traveler”—his first poem—to his brother, all exhibiting the affectionate manliness of his disposition. And with reference to his brother, we have a trait of Goldsmith’s character which is worth the Vicar of Wakefield. He was once invited to call on the Duke of Northumberland, when that nobleman was going to Ireland, as Lord Lieutenant. Sir John Hawkins, who was leaving the duke’s presence as Oliver was going in, tells the story with indignant reprobation of the poet’s fatal absurdity. His grace having complimented Goldsmith on his writings (he had just written Edwin and Angelina to amuse the duchess), said he was going to Ireland, and would be happy to promote the doctor’s interests in any way, etc. Whereupon the doctor told the duke that the publishers were treating him pretty well just then; but that he had a poor brother in Ireland, a curate on forty pounds a year, with a large family, and begged his grace to remember _him_, etc. “In this way,” groans Sir John Hawkins, “did Goldsmith dispose of his chance of patronage and fortune.”

As a poet, Goldsmith at once took the rank which posterity has almost unanimously confirmed. The finest critics in the language have honored the claims of the poet of Auburn. Lord Byron says, “where is the poetry of which one half is good? Is it Milton’s? Is it Dryden’s; or any one’s except Pope’s and Goldsmith’s, of which _all_ is good?” There is no need at this time of day, to speak of the nature, pathos and elegance of Goldsmith’s muse. In stateliness he sometimes approaches Dryden; as in those noble verses which Johnson could not read without a tremor and tears of pride:—

“Stern o’er each bosom reason holds her state, With daring aims, irregularly great: Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by.”

But there is one respect in which we think his poetry has not been appreciated as it ought.

The great change which has taken place in poetry from the classic rhythmus and Cæsural canons of Pope’s school, to the nature and fresher phraseology of our modern period has been commonly dated from the rise of Wordsworth and Coleridge—sometimes traced to the effect of Bishop Percy’s ballads. There is generally an incorrectness in any attempt to fix mutations of taste and fashions of style down to chronology. Instead of thinking the old poetic spirit of England was revived at the close of the eighteenth century, we believe it had not died at all; but had lived on, in exile, while a foreign influence bore sway—as the line of Edgar Atheling lived long ago; destined, however, in the fullness of time to be restored to its ancient supremacy. Bishop Percy’s ballads were a manifestation of that spirit, not a cause of it—though he might not have known it—a necessary reaction of the national mind. At the time of their appearance Goldsmith’s poetry was exhibiting the first tokens of the coming change. The theme of it was human nature, with its common feelings, hopes, and sufferings; and pouring the warmth, pathos and earnestness of his own heart into it, he rendered it attractive and popular. His verse had all the vernacular ease and grace of his prose, with a polish only inferior to Pope’s. In his original hands the heroic couplet was not “the clock-work tintinnabulum of rhyme” beaten by the Cawthornes, Darwins, and Hayleys of the day. In his prose criticisms he wrote against the cumbrous use of epithets, and discarded it in his own verse. He amused himself occasionally among his friends, by reciting the lines of several popular authors, with a dissyllable omitted. He would read the opening of Gray’s Elegy in this way:

The curfew tolls the knell of day, The lowing herd winds o’er the lea: The ploughman homeward plods his way And leaves the world to gloom and me.

In this respect he must have been rather hard on Johnson, whose poetry in many respects is “the hubbub of words,” which Wordsworth so scornfully terms some of it. The first couplet of the doctor’s great satire has one superfluous line—

Let observation, with extended view, Survey mankind from China to Peru—

The poem would have started better from “Survey.”

Johnson, indeed, used to ridicule the taste that came up with the Percy Ballads. They had “a false gallop of verses,” in his opinion, and he said he could go on making such stanzas for an hour together, thus:

As with my hat upon my head, I walked along the Strand, There I met another man With his hat in his hand.

But in this, as in a great many other matters of literature, morals, and taste, Johnson did not prove himself an infallible doctor. Goldsmith’s taste, of a genuine _vates_, led him at once to appreciate the simple lyrics of Percy’s collection; and his charming ballad of the Hermit shows how he felt the fresh spirit of them. This excellent poem was written for the Countess of Northumberland. And here we may remark that three of the most attractive modern English poems were composed especially for ladies of high rank—or at their suggestion:—The Lay of the Last Minstrel, at the wish of Lady Anna Scott, daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch; The Sofa, for Lady Hesketh; and Goldsmith’s Ballad for the Countess.