|WHAT was it that suggested to Goldsmith raphers and commentators have
pointed to more than one plausible model,--the 'Lettres Persanes' of
Montesquieu, the 'Lettres d'une Péruvienne' of Madame de Graffigny, the
'Lettres Chinoises' of the Marquis d'Argens, the 'Asiatic' of Voltaire's
'Lettres Philosophiques.' But it is sometimes wise, especially in such
hand-to-mouth work as journalism, which was all Goldsmith at first
intended, to seek for origins in the immediate neighbourhood rather
than in remoter places. In 1757 Horace Walpole published anonymously, in
pamphlet form, a clever little squib upon Admiral Byng's 'The Citizen of
the World'? Biogtrial in particular and English inconstancy in general,
which he entitled 'A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London,
to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking.' This was briefly noticed in the
May issue of the 'Monthly Review,' where Goldsmith was then acting as
scribbler-general to Griffiths, the proprietor of the magazine (his
reviews of Home's 'Douglas' and of Burke's 'Sublime and Beautiful'
appeared in the same number), and it was described as in Montesquieu's
manner. A year later Goldsmith is writing mysteriously to his friend Bob
Bryan-ton, of Ballymulvey, in Ireland, about a 'Chinese whom he shall
soon make talk like an Englishman;' and when at last his 'Chinese
Letters,' as they were called at first, begin to appear in Newbury's
'Public Ledger,' he takes for the name of his Oriental, Lien Chi
Altangi, one of Walpole's imaginary correspondents having been Lien Chi.
This chain of association, if slight, is strong enough to justify some
connection. The fundamental idea, no doubt, was far older than either
Walpole or Goldsmith; but it is not too much to suppose that Walpole's
_jeu d'esprit_ supplied just that opportune suggestion which produced
the remarkable and now too-much-neglected series of letters afterwards
reprinted under the general title of 'The Citizen of the World.'
'The metaphors and illusions,' says Goldsmith in one of those admirable
prefaces of which he possessed the secret, 'are all drawn from the
East;' and in another place he tells us that a certain apostrophe is
wholly translated from Ambulaaohamed, a real (or fictitious) Arabian
poet. To these ingenuities he no doubt attached the exaggerated
importance habitually assigned to work which has cost its writer pains.
But it is not the adroitness of his adaptations from Le Comte and
Du Halde that most detains us now. The purely Oriental part of the
work--although it includes the amusing story (an 'Ephesian Matron' _à la
Chinoise_) of the widow who, in her haste to marry again, fans her late
husband's grave to dry it quicker, and the apologue of Prince Bonbennin
and the White Mouse--is practically dead wood. It is Goldsmith under the
transparent disguise of Lien Chi--Goldsmith commenting, after the
manner of Addison and Steele, upon Georgian England, that attracts and
interests the modern reader. His Chinese Philosopher might well have
wondered at the lazy puddle moving muddily along the ill-kept London
streets, at the large feet and white teeth of the women, at the unwieldy
signs with their nondescript devices, at the unaccountable fashion of
lying-in-state; but it is Goldsmith, and Goldsmith only, who could
have imagined the admirable humour of the dialogue on liberty between
a prisoner (through his grating), a porter pausing from his burden to
denounce slavery and the French, and a soldier who, with a tremendous
oath, advocates, above all, the importance of religion. It is
Goldsmith again--the Goldsmith of Green-Arbour-Court and Griffith's
back-parlour--who draws, from a harder experience than could have been
possible to Lien Chi, the satiric picture of the so-called republic of
letters which forms his twentieth epistle. 'Each looks upon his fellow
as a rival, not an assistant in the same pursuit. They calumniate, they
injure, they despise, they ridicule each other: if one man writes a book
that pleases, others shall write books to show that he might have given
still greater pleasure, or should not have pleased. If one happens to
hit on something new, there are numbers ready to assure the public that
all this was no novelty to them or the learned; that Cardanus or Brunus,
or some other author too dull to be generally read, had anticipated the
discovery. Thus, instead of uniting like the members of a commonwealth,
they are divided into almost as many factions as there are men; and
their jarring constitution, instead of being styled a republic of
letters, should be entitled an anarchy of literature.' One rubs one's
eyes as one reads; one asks oneself under one's breath if it is of our
day that the satirist is speaking. No; it is of the reign of the second
of the Georges, before Grub Street was turned into Milton Street.
Literature, in its different aspects, plays not a small part in the
lucubrations of Lien Chi. Two of the best letters are devoted to a
whimsical description of the vagaries of some of its humbler professors,
who hold a Saturday Club at the 'Broom' at Islington; others treat of
the decay of poetry; of novels, and 'Tristram Shandy' in particular; of
the necessity of intrigue or riches as a means to success. Nor are
Art and the Drama neglected. The virtuoso, who afforded such a fund
of amusement to Fielding and Smollett, receives his full share of
attention; and in the papers upon acting and actors, Goldsmith once more
displays that critical common-sense which he had shown so conspicuously
in 'The Bee.' Travellers and their trivialities are freely ridiculed;
there are papers on Newmarket, on the Marriage Act, on the coronation,
on the courts of justice; on quacks, gaming, paint, mourning, and mad
dogs. There is a letter on the irreverent behaviour of the congregation
in St. Paul's; there is another on the iniquity of making shows of
public monuments. Now and then a more serious note is touched, as when
the author is stirred to unwonted gravity by the savage penal code of
his day, which, 'cementing the laws with blood,' closed every avenue
with a gibbet, and against which Johnson too lifted his sonorous voice.=
```'Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die,
```With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply,'--=
he sang in 'London,' anticipating his later utterances in 'The Rambler.'
Goldsmith, on the other hand, crystallized in his verse the raw material
of which he made his Chinese philosopher the mouthpiece. Several of the
best known passages of his two longest poems have their first form in
the prose of Lien Chi. Indeed, one actual line of 'The Traveller,' 'A
land of tyrants, and a den of slaves,' is simply a textual quotation
from 'The Citizen of the World.'
But what in the Chinese letters is even more remarkable than their
clever raillery of social incongruities and abuses, is their occasional
indication of the author's innate but hitherto undisclosed gift for the
delineation of humorous character. Up to this time he had exhibited
no particular tendency in this direction. The little sketches of Jack
Spindle and 'my cousin Hannah,' in 'The Bee,' go no farther than
the corresponding personifications of particular qualities in the
'Spectator' and 'Tatler;' and they are not of the kind which, to employ
a French figure, 'enter the skin' of the personality presented. But in
the case of the eccentric philanthropist of 'The Citizen of the World,'
whom he christens the 'Man in Black,' he comes nearer to such a definite
embodiment as Addison's 'Will Wimble.' The 'Man in Black' is evidently
a combination of some of those Goldsmith family traits which were
afterwards so successfully recalled in Dr. Primrose, Mr. Hardcastle,
and the clergyman of 'The Deserted Village.' The contrast between his
credulous charity and his expressed distrust of human nature, between
his simulated harshness and his real amiability, constitutes a type
which has since been often used successfully in English literature; it
is clear, too, that in the account of his life he borrows both from his
author and his author's father. When he speaks of his unwillingness to
take orders, of his dislike to wear a long wig when he preferred a
short one, or a black coat when he dressed in brown, he is only giving
expression to that incompatibility of temper which led to Goldsmith's
rejection for ordination by the Bishop of Elphin; while in his picture
of his father's house, with its simple, kindly prodigality, its little
group of grateful parasites who laugh, like Mr. Hardcastle's servants,
at the host's old jokes, and the careless paternal benevolence which
makes the children 'mere machines of pity,' 'instructed in the art
of giving away thousands before they were taught the more necessary
qualifications of getting a farthing,' one recognizes the environment
of that emphatically Irish household on the road from Ballymahon to
Athlone, in which Goldsmith's own boyhood had been spent.
Excellent as he is, however, the 'Man in Black,' with his grudging
generosity and his 'reluctant goodness,' is surpassed in completeness of
characterization by the more finished portrait of Beau Tibbs. The poor
little pinched pretender to fashion, with his tarnished finery and his
reed-voiced, simpering helpmate,--with his coffee-house cackle of my
Lord Mudler and the Duchess of Piccadilly, and his magnificent promises
of turbot and ortolan, which issue pitifully in postponed ox-cheek and
bitter beer,--approaches the dimensions of a masterpiece. Charles Lamb,
one would think, must have rejoiced over the reckless assurance which
expatiates on the charming view of the Thames from the garret of a
back-street in the suburbs, which glorifies the 'paltry, unframed
pictures' on its walls into essays in the manner of the celebrated
Grisoni and transforms a surly Scotch hag-of-all-work into an old and
privileged family-servant,--the gift 'of a friend of mine, a Parliament
man from the Highlands.' Nor are there many pages in Dickens more
perennially humorous than the scene in which the 'Man in Black,' his
_inamorata_ the pawnbroker's widow, and Mr. and Mrs. Tibbs, all make
a party to the picturesque old Vauxhall Gardens of Jonathan Tyers. The
inimitable sparring which ensues between the second-hand gentility of
the beau's lady and the moneyed vulgarity of the tradesman's relict,
their different and wholly irreconcilable views of the entertainment,
and the tragic termination of the whole, by which the widow is balked
of 'the waterworks' because good manners constrain her to sit out the
wiredrawn _roulades_ and quavers of Mrs. Tibbs--these are things which
age cannot wither nor custom stale. If Goldsmith had written nothing but
this miniature trilogy of Beau Tibbs,--if Dr. Primrose were uninvented
and Tony Lumpkin non-existent,--he would still have earned a perpetual
place among English humourists.
Something of this, undoubtedly, he owed to the fortunate instinct which
dictated his choice of his material. The forerunner of Dickens,--the
disciple, although he knew it not, of Fielding,--he makes his capital
by his disregard of the reigning models of his time. Declining to select
his characters from the fashionable abstractions of Sentimental Comedy
and the mechanical puppets of conventional High Life, he turns aside
to the moving, various, many-coloured middle-classes, from whose ranks
originality has not yet been banished, or nature cast out. Of these he
had knowledge and experience; of those he had seen but little. Upon the
other walk, his labours might have been as forgotten as the 'Henry' of
Richard Cumberland or the 'Henrietta' of Mrs. Charlotte Lenox. But he
took his own line; and in consequence, Beau Tibbs and the pawnbroker's
widow (with her rings and her green damask) are as much alive to-day as
Partridge or Mrs. Nickleby.