Part 2

Bishop Percy prints the whole of this letter, except that he delicately bowdlerised one or two phrases in it, and from the Percy version it has reappeared in every one of the succeeding biographies.

EARLY LETTERS FROM LONDON.

The second series of letters begins after Oliver had returned to England about a couple of years, and was “by a very little practice as a physician and a very little reputation as a poet making a shift to live,” as he describes it in a letter to his brother-in-law Daniel Hodson, dated from the Temple Exchange Coffee House, on 27 December, 1757. His brother Charles Goldsmith had paid Oliver a visit in London, and had informed him “of the fatigue you were at in soliciting a subscription to relieve me, not only among my friends and relations, but acquaintance in general. Tho my pride might feel some repugnance at being thus relieved, yet my gratitude can suffer no diminution.... Whether I eat or starve, live in a first floor or four pairs of stairs high, I still remember them [my friends] with ardour, nay my very country comes in for a share of my affection. Unaccountable fondness for country, this maladie du Pays, as the french call it.” He hopes that if he can be absent six weeks from London next summer “to spend three of them among my friends in Ireland. My design is purely to visit, and neither to cut a figure nor levy contributions--neither to excite envy nor solicit favour: in fact my circumstances are adapted to neither. I am too poor to be gazed at, and too rich to need assistance.”

Percy here omits what he calls “some mention of private family matters.” The letter is at this point frayed and imperfect, but these words can be made out:

“Charles is furnished with everything necessary, but why ... stranger to assist him. I hope he will be improved in his ... against his return [from Jamaica]. Poor Jenny! But it is what I expected. My mother too has lost Pallas! My dear Sir, these things give me real uneasiness, and I could wish to redress them. But at present there is hardly a Kingdom in Europe in which I am not a debtor” etc.

After an interval, Goldsmith had what was for him a real bout of letter-writing to a number of his kinsfolk and friends, to solicit their assistance in getting subscriptions for his “Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe” on which he was engaged, and which was about to be published. On 7 August, 1758, he wrote to his cousin and school-fellow Edward Mills that his “Essay on the Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe,” as it was then called, was “now printing in London, and I have requested Mr. Radcliff, Mr. Lawder, Mr. Bryanton, my brother Mr. Henry Goldsmith, and my brother-in-law Mr. Hodson, to circulate my proposals among their acquaintances.”

The letter to Dr. Radcliff is unknown: the date of that to Mrs. Lawder, asking her husband’s help, is 15 August, 1758; that to Bryanton is 14 August, 1758; the letter to Henry Goldsmith is lost, but a second letter to him on the same subject says “I shall the beginning of next month send over two hundred and fifty books.” As the work was published on 2 April, 1759, the date of this second letter to the Revd. Henry Goldsmith was probably February, 1759. (It has been preserved, but is not actually dated.)

Taking these several communications in the order of their date, the letter of 7 August, 1758, to Edward Mills, which I exhibit to-day, is a frank appeal for help in circulating the prospectus of Oliver’s new book, but otherwise contains nothing of importance. “Every book published here [London] the printers in Ireland republish there, without giving the Author the least consideration for his coppy. I would in this respect disappoint their avarice, and have all the additional advantages that may result from the sale of my performance there to myself.”

Neither Mills nor Lawder (to whom a similar request was made through the medium of his wife on the 15th of the same month of August, 1758) appears to have taken any notice of it, and in writing to his brother Henry at a later date--about February, 1759--Oliver says “The behaviour of Mr. Mills and Mr. Lawder is a little extraordinary: however, their answering neither you nor me is a sufficient indication of their disliking the employment which I assignd them. As their conduct is different from what I had expected so I have made an alteration in mine. I shall the beginning of next month send over two hundred and fifty books, which are all that I fancy, can be well sold among you.”

The next letter, that dated 14 August, 1758, addressed to Robert Bryanton is only known to us through its appearance for the first time in Prior’s _Life_ (I, 263). It complains of not having heard from Bryanton or of his doings, gives an amusing prophecy of his own future fame 200 years onwards as the author of the Essay on Polite Learning “a work well worth its weight in diamonds,” and then descends suddenly to earth with “Oh! Gods! Gods! here in a garret writing for bread and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score! However, dear Bob, whether in penury or affluence, serious or gay, I am ever thine. Give the most warm and sincere wish you can conceive to your mother, Mrs. Bryanton, to Miss Bryanton, to yourself: and if there be a favourite dog in the family, let me be remembered to it.”

The letter to Mrs. Lawder of 15 August, 1758, is a good deal more guarded, as his relations with his cousin and her husband appear not to have been at that time of a very cordial nature. The original has passed through several hands, and has been reproduced more than once in facsimile. I believe it is now the property of Mr. Sabin of Bond Street. Oliver says he had written to Kilmore (Mrs. Lawder’s address) from Leyden, from Louvain and from Rouen, but had received no answer. “To what could I attribute this, please, but displeasure or forgetfulness?”... “I heartily wish to be rich, if it were only for this reason to say without a blush how much I esteem you, but alas I have many a fatigue to encounter, before that happy time comes: when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore fireside, recount the various adventures of an hard-fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your harpsicord and forget that he ever starv’d in those streets where Butler and Otway starv’d before him.” After a pathetic allusion to the decaying mental powers of his uncle Contarine, Oliver then makes his appeal as to the “Polite Learning,” but “whether this request is complied with or not, I shall not be uneasy.”

The second letter to Daniel Hodson, which I exhibit, is provisionally dated by the modern authorities about November, 1758. It was published by Percy in the edition of 1801, with the family matters omitted, and some few alterations and excisions. The letter really begins “You can’t expect regularity in _a correspondence with_ one who is regular in nothing.” Later, Goldsmith says: “You imagine, I suppose, that every author by profession lives in a garret, wears shabby cloaths and converses with the meanest company; _but I assure you such a character is_ entirely chimerical.” The family matters omitted by Percy may as well be restored:

“I am very much pleasd with the accounts you send me of your little son; if I do not mistake that was his hand which subscrib’d itself Gilbeen Hardly. There is nothing could please me more than a letter filld with all the news of the country, but I fear you will think that too troublesome, you see I never cease writing till a whole sheet of paper is wrote out. I beg you will immitate me in this particular and give your letters good measure. You can tell me, what visits you receive or pay, who has been married or debauch’d, since my absence, what fine girls you have starting up and beating of the veterans of my acquaintance from future conquest. I suppose before I return I shall find all the blooming virgins I once left in Westmeath shrivelled into a parcel of hags with seven children apiece tearing down their petticoats. Most of the Bucks and Bloods whom I left hunting and drinking and swearing and getting bastards I find are dead. Poor devils they kick’d the world before them. I wonder what the devil they kick now.” [End of first sheet of letter.]

On a fresh sheet:

“Dear Sister I wrote to Kilmore [where the Lawders lived]. I wish you would let me know how that family stands affected with regard to me. My Brother Charles promised to tell me all about it but his letter gave me no satisfaction in those particulars. I beg you and Dan would put your hands to the oar and fill me a sheet with somewhat or other, if you can’t get quite thro your selves lend Billy or Nancy the pen and let the dear little things give me their nonsense. Talk all about your selves and nothing about me. You see I do so. I do not know how my desire of seeing Ireland which had so long slept, has again revived with so much ardour....” “I ... brother Charles is settled to business. I see no probability of ... any other proceeding.” [Here follow sixteen lines of writing, which have been very effectually blotted out with ink of another tint, probably by the recipient, who sent the letter to be read by a neighbour.]

The letter ends thus (it is not signed):

“Pray let me hear from my Mother since she will not gratify me herself and tell me if in any thing I can be immediately serviceable to her. Tell me how my Brother Goldsmith and his Bishop agree. Pray do this for me for heaven knows I would do anything to serve you.” [ends.]

The back page is blank, except the address in Goldsmith’s writing: “Daniel Hodson Esq^r. at Lishoy near | Ballymahon | Ireland.”

We come now to the one letter to his brother the Revd. Henry Goldsmith which has been preserved. It bears no date, and was doubtless written about February, 1759. After speaking about the “Polite Learning” book, Oliver goes on to describe his own difficulties:

“You scarce can conceive how much eight years of disappointment anguish and study have worn me down. Imagine to yourself a pale melancholly visage with two great wrinkles between the eye-brows, with an eye disgustingly severe and a big wig, and you may have a perfect picture of my present appearance.”

He then discusses and approves as judicious and convincing his brother’s proposals for “breeding up your son as a scholar.” “Preach then my dear Sir, to your son not the excellence of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering uncle’s example be placed in his eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue before I was taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.” (The Percy Memoir of 1801 prunes and waters down this passage.)

After references to his mother and other members of the family, Oliver mentions the imminent publication of his “catchpenny” life of Voltaire, which has brought him in £20, and quotes some phrases of the “heroicomical poem” on the design of which he had asked his brother’s opinion in a previous letter (now lost).

These are the well-known lines commencing

The window, patch’d with paper lent a ray, That feebly show’d the state in which he lay

with the subsequent references to the “sanded floor” the “humid wall” the game of goose, “the twelve rules the royal martyr drew,” etc. These lines with a different setting reappeared in Letter XXX of the Citizen of the World, which first appeared in the _Public Ledger_ for 2 May, 1760, and some of them were worked afterwards into lines 227-36 of the Deserted Village, 1770, where they are improved by the addition of:

“The Chest contriv’d a double debt to pay A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.”

Following his usual practice when he does set to work on a letter, Oliver writes on to the extreme bottom of the page, and finishes thus: “I am resolved to leave no space, tho I should fill it up only by telling you what you very well know already, I mean that I am your most affectionate friend and brother, Oliver Goldsmith.”

LATER LETTERS.

There is now a long gap in the letters to his family, only in fact broken by two communications, one to his nephew Henry dated 7 June, 1768, condoling with him on the death of his father the Revd. Henry, and the other to his own brother Maurice despatched about January, 1770, in response to the latter’s request for financial assistance.

The first of these two letters has only just come to light, having been recently purchased through a dealer who got it from Nova Scotia by Mr. William Harris Arnold of Nutley, New Jersey, U.S.A., to whose kindness I owe a transcript of it. It is a letter of deep feeling at the death of his brother, and contains a promise to help the nephew if possible.

The second letter to Maurice Goldsmith--the last of the series on which I propose to comment--makes over to him a legacy of £15 which Uncle Contarine had left to Oliver in his will, and regrets his inability to help Maurice further. “I am not fond of thinking of the necessities of those I love, when it is so very little in my power to help them. I am sorry to find you are still every way unprovided for, and what adds to my uneasiness is that I have received a letter from my sister Johnson by which I learn that she is pretty much in the same circumstances.” It is true that the King has made him Professor of Ancient History to the newly established Royal Academy of Arts (1768), “but there is no salary annexed, and I took it rather as a compliment to the institution than any benefit to myself. Honours to one in my situation are something like ruffles to a man that wants a shirt.” Oliver sends kind messages to members of the family, and asks specifically for particulars about them. “A sheet of paper occasionally filled with news of this kind would make me very happy and would keep you nearer my mind. As it is my dear brother believe me to be Yours most affectionately, Oliver Goldsmith.”

The remaining letters printed in the Percy Memoir do not concern Goldsmith’s family, but it may be mentioned incidentally that they are all in the bundle of Goldsmithiana left by the Bishop. They are (1) a letter to Sir Joshua Reynolds written from France in 1770 when Oliver acted as escort to Mrs. Horneck and her two charming daughters the Jessamy Bride and Little Comedy. (2) A letter by Goldsmith to Bennet Langton dated 7 September, 1771 (with, it may be added, the letter from Langton--not printed in the Memoir--to which it is a reply). (3) Letters to Goldsmith from General Oglethorp (no date), Thomas Paine (21 December, 1772), John Oakman (a begging letter in verse, dated 27 March, 1773), and other miscellanea.

MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS.

I should be sorry if I left you with the impression that the letters from which I have been reading extracts were the only original documents connected with the poet and his works included in Dr. Percy’s manuscript bundle of “Goldsmithiana.” The contrary is the case: but the time available to me this afternoon is too short to enable me to discuss the various interesting points that they raise. I feel, however, I must refer in the briefest manner possible to some miscellaneous papers of different kinds which I found therein relating to the preliminaries for and the production of that delightful and ever-fresh comedy of “She Stoops to Conquer,” first given to the world on Monday, 15 March, 1773. There are a letter from the Prompter dated “Sunday evening” (no doubt 14 March, 1773), saying he had taken the necessary steps for changing the name of the play from “The Mistakes of a Night”; orders for boxes for subsequent performances; requests for free seats; congratulations and criticism on its success; a full account in Percy’s writing of Goldsmith’s personal chastisement of Evans the bookseller for Kenrick’s malicious article in the _London Packet_ of Wednesday, 24 March, 1773 (endorsed in the Bishop’s hand “The termination of the affray with Evans, as first intended, but afterwards altered out of tenderness to Dr. G’s Memory”); a printed copy of the _London Packet_ of Friday, 26 March, containing its own account of the encounter with Evans; George Coleman’s original letter of 23 March, 1773, begging Goldsmith to “take him off the rack of the newspapers”; manuscript copies (not in Goldsmith’s writing) of two rejected Epilogues to the play; and other documents of great human interest.

As I have consistently tried in this address to avoid indulging in theories, and to limit myself to demonstrable facts, I refrain from a discussion as to why these documents of 1773 are in such force in the resuscitated bundle of Percy papers, whereas there are comparatively few and scattered documents of earlier date. I should not, however, be surprised if Goldsmith, dreading that the commotion caused and public comment excited by his scuffle with Evans might involve him in further disagreeable consequences, had himself collected these papers and consulted Percy personally thereon, with the result that they remained in the latter’s custody.

When nearly a quarter of a century later, Percy put his hand to the preparation of the Memoir of his friend, he may have thought that the discreditable incidents obscuring the memory of a great public success were best buried in oblivion; and he therefore confined himself in the published work to the statement that “She Stoops to Conquer” “added very much to the author’s reputation, and brought down upon him a torrent of congratulatory addresses and petitions from less fortunate bards whose indigence compelled them to solicit his bounty, and of scurrilous abuse from such of them, as being less reduced, only envied his success.” (_Memoir_, p. 101.)

Percy could not, it is true, resist the temptation of placing on record in the Memoir “Tom Tickle’s” attack on Goldsmith in the _London Packet_: but, says he, “we would not defile our page with this scurrilous production, so shall insert it in the margin.” (pp. 103-5, notes.)

It seems to me not unlikely that Percy’s opinion was sought as to the wording of the defence or disclaimer by Goldsmith “To the Public” which appeared in the _Daily Advertiser_ of 31 March, 1773, as this also is printed _in extenso_ in the Memoir of 1801 (pp. 107-8). Dr. Johnson had certainly no hand in its preparation, for on Saturday, 3 April, in response to an enquiry by the obsequious Boswell, he said: “Sir, Dr. Goldsmith would no more have asked me to have wrote such a thing as that for him, than he would have asked me to feed him with a spoon, or to do anything else that denoted imbecility.... He has indeed done it very well, but it is a foolish thing well done.” Percy says in the Memoir (p. 107): “The subject of this dispute was long discussed in the public papers, which discanted on the impropriety of attacking a man in his own house: and an action was threatened for the assault: which was at length compromised”: and here he leaves it, as we may well do.

One other matter connected with “She Stoops to Conquer” I must ask your permission to touch upon before I conclude. Four attempts were made at an Epilogue for the play, and the Percy documents enable us for the first time to understand the sequence of these. Two of them were printed (not quite textually) in Vol. II of the Memoir of 1801, and Percy, who set great store by them, complains to his correspondents that enough credit was not given to him by the publishers for them. He told Dr. Robert Anderson:

“The Dr. had likewise given him two original Poems that had never been printed. These are the two Epilogues printed in the second Volume, viz: that spoken by Mrs. Bulkley and Miss Catley, and that intended for Mrs. Bulkley. The latter [it] is said in a Note, was given in Manuscript to Dr. Percy by the Author, but no such mention is made of the former, tho’ it was also so given by him and delivered to the Publishers in his own writing.”

Percy was a little in doubt about the second of these Epilogues (which in the edition of 1801 he cut down from 58 lines to 42), for he invited George Steevens on 10 September, 1797, to ask Mrs. Bulkley if she remembered for what play it was intended: “He [Goldsmith] gave it me among a parcel of letters and papers, some written by himself, and some addressed to him, but with not much explanation” (_Literary Illustrations_, VII, 31). Steevens’ reply of 14 September, 1797, was in his usual caustic vein: “The lady you would have interrogated ceased to be at least seven years ago: and what would the public say could it be known that your Lordship, a Protestant Bishop, was desirous to send your sober correspondents into the other world a harlot-hunting?” (_Ibid_, 32).

It is a little surprising that the Bishop should not have at once recognised its obvious associations with “She Stoops to Conquer,” in view of the two lines at the end of the Epilogue:

“No high-life scenes, no sentiment: the creature “Still stoops among the low to copy nature.”

But all these points, in their way interesting and even absorbing, are rather beyond the object with which I embarked upon this paper, viz.: to do justice to the affectionate side of Goldsmith’s warm Irish nature by bringing into relief the letters which, despite his repugnance to correspondence, he from time to time addressed to members of his own family with ardent and even pitiful appeals for news from Ireland. These appeals, it is to be feared, had no satisfactory response from the recipients of the letters which after their many adventures I have now had the privilege of exhibiting to you, and which I think serve to illustrate the truth of Dr. Johnson’s dictum: “Goldsmith was a man of such variety of powers and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing: a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint and easy without weakness.”

APPENDIX.

_Biographical particulars as to the members of Oliver Goldsmith’s family, partly from unpublished sources._

Oliver Goldsmith died on 4 April, 1774. Although there was some talk of a biography of him being undertaken by Johnson, it appears to have become a common understanding, soon after the death, amongst the members of The Club and their associates that the work of collecting and preparing the materials for the biography would be done by Thomas Percy. At that time Percy had achieved a certain reputation in literary circles, but was by no means the important person in the ecclesiastical sense that he afterwards became. He was then mainly resident in London as Chaplain and Secretary to the Duke of Northumberland and as one of the Chaplains of the King. It was not until 1778 that he was made Dean of Carlisle, from which position he was promoted in 1782 to the Bishopric of Dromore in Ireland.

Percy had already written out in his own hand a Memorandum dictated to him by Goldsmith himself “one rainy day at Northumberland House” (28 April, 1773) giving dates and many interesting particulars relating to his life, and this Memorandum is still in existence. Too much importance must not be attached to it. Percy no doubt regarded it as a Memorandum only, which might prove useful under future conditions that had not then arisen, and how much of it is Goldsmith and how much Percy must for ever remain unknown. The Statement was communicated to Johnson; not used by him: returned by his executors to the wrong person (Malone), sent by him to Percy, and apparently not used textually by him for the purpose of his Memoir of his friend. In any case, there is not much in it about the members of Oliver’s family.