The party remained in the room for some time, and when at last a waiter
from the bar was sent for and requested to tell Dr. Goldsmith, who was
having his hat brushed, that his party were ready to leave the house,
the man stated that Dr. Goldsmith had left some time ago, hurrying in
the direction of Pall Mall.
“Psha! sir,” said Johnson to Burke, “Dr. Goldsmith is little better than
a fool.” Johnson did not know what such nervousness as Goldsmith's was.
“Yes,” said Burke, “Dr. Goldsmith is, I suppose, the greatest fool that
ever wrote the best poem of a century, the best novel of a century, and
let us hope that, after the lapse of a few hours, I may be able to say
the best comedy of a century.”
“I suppose we may take it for granted that he has gone to the
playhouse?” said Richard Burke.
“It is not wise to take anything for granted so far as Goldsmith is
concerned,” said Steevens. “I think that the best course we can adopt
is for some of us to go to the playhouse without delay. The play must be
looked after; but for myself I mean to look after the author. Gentlemen,
Oliver Goldsmith needs to be looked after carefully. No one knows what a
burden he has been forced to bear during the past month.”
“You think it is actually possible that he has not preceded us to the
playhouse, sir,” said Johnson.
“If I know anything of him, sir,” said Steevens, “the playhouse is just
the place which he would most persistently avoid.” There was a long
pause before Johnson said in his weightiest manner:
“Sir, we are all his friends; we hold you responsible for his safety.”
“That is very kind of you, sir,” replied Steevens. “But you may rest
assured that I will do my best to find him, wherever he may be.”
While the rest of the party set out for Covent Garden Theatre, Steevens
hurried off in the opposite direction. He felt that he understood
Goldsmith's mood. He believed that he would come upon him sitting
alone in some little-frequented coffee house brooding over the probable
failure of his play. The cheerful optimism of the man, which enabled
him to hold out against Colman and his sneers, would, he was convinced,
suffer a relapse when there was no urgent reason for its exercise, and
his naturally sanguine temperament would at this critical hour of his
life give place to a brooding melancholy, making it impossible for him
to put in an appearance at the theatre, and driving him far from his
friends. Steevens actually made up his mind that if he failed to find
Goldsmith during the next hour or two, he would seek him at his cottage
on the Edgware road.
He went on foot from coffee house to coffee house--from Jack's, in Dean
street, to the Old Bell, in Westminster--but he failed to discover his
friend in one of them. An hour and a half he spent in this way; and all
this time roars of laughter from every part of the playhouse--except
the one box that held Cumberland and his friends--were greeting the
brilliant dialogue, the natural characterisation, and the admirably
contrived situations in the best comedy that a century of brilliant
authors had witnessed.
The scene comes before one with all the vividness that many able pens
have imparted to a description of its details. We see the enormous
figure of Dr. Johnson leaning far out of the box nearest the stage, with
a hand behind his ear, so as to lose no word spoken on the stage; and
as phrase after phrase, sparkling with wit, quivering with humour and
vivified with numbers of allusions to the events of the hour, is spoken,
he seems to shake the theatre with his laughter.
Reynolds is in the opposite corner, his ear-trumpet resting on the ledge
of the box, his face smiling thoughtfully; and between these two
notable figures Miss Reynolds is seated bolt upright, and looking rather
frightened as the people in the pit look up now and again at the box.
Baretti is in the next box with Angelica Kauffman, Dr. Burney and little
Miss Fanny Burney, destined in a year or two to become for a time the
most notable woman in England. On the other side of the house Lord Clare
occupies a box with his charming tom-boy daughter, who is convulsed with
laughter as she hears reference made in the dialogue to the trick which
she once played upon the wig of her dear friend the author. General
Oglethorpe, who is beside her, holds up his finger in mock reproof, and
Lord Camden, standing behind his chair, looks as if he regretted having
lost the opportunity of continuing his acquaintance with an author whom
every one is so highly honouring at the moment.
Cumberland and his friends are in a lower box, “looking glum,” as one
witness asserts, though a good many years later Cumberland boasted of
having contributed in so marked a way to the applause as to call forth
the resentment of the pit.
In the next box Hugh Kelly, whose most noted success at Drury Lane a few
years previously eclipsed Goldsmith's “Good-Natured Man” at “the other
house,” sits by the side of Macpherson, the rhapsodist who invented
“Ossian.” He glares at Dr. Johnson, who had no hesitation in calling him
an impostor.
The Burkes, Edmund and Richard, are in a box with Mrs. Horneck and her
younger daughter, who follows breathlessly the words with which she has
for long been familiar, and at every shout of laughter that comes from
the pit she is moved almost to tears. She is quite unaware of the fact
that Colonel Gwyn, sitting alone in another part of the house, has his
eyes fixed upon her--earnestly, affectionately. Her brother and his
_fiancée_ are in a box with the Bunburys; and in the most important
box in the house Mrs. Thrale sits well forward, so that all eyes may
be gratified by beholding her. It does not so much matter about her
husband, who once thought that the fact of his being the proprietor of a
concern whose operations represented the potentialities of wealth
beyond the dreams of avarice entitled him to play upon the mother of the
Gunnings when she first came to London the most contemptible hoax ever
recorded to the eternal discredit of a man. The Duchess of Argyll,
mindful of that trick which the cleverness of her mother turned to so
good account, does not condescend to notice from her box, where she sits
with Lady Betty Hamilton, either the brewer or his pushing wife, though
she is acquainted with old General Paoli, whom the latter is patronising
between the acts.
What a play! What spectators!
We listen to the one year by year with the same delight that it brought
to those who heard it this night for the first time; and we look with
delight at the faces of the notable spectators which the brush of the
little man with the ear-trumpet in Johnson's box has made immortal.
Those two men in that box were the means of conferring immortality
upon their century. Incomparable Johnson, who chose Boswell to be his
biographer! Incomparable Reynolds, who, on innumerable canvases, handed
down to the next century all the grace and distinction of his own!
And all this time Oliver Goldsmith is pacing with bent head and hands
nervously clasped behind him, backward and forward, the broad walk in
St. James's Park.
Steevens came upon him there after spending nearly two hours searching
for him.
“Don't speak, man, for God's sake,” cried Oliver. “'Tis not so dark but
that I can see disaster imprinted on your face. You come to tell me that
the comedy is ended--that the curtain was obliged to be rung down in the
middle of an act. You come to tell me that my comedy of life is ended.”
“Not I,” said Steevens. “I have not been at the playhouse yet. Why, man,
what can be the matter with you? Why did you leave us in the lurch at
the coffee house?”
“I don't know what you speak of,” said Goldsmith. “But I beg of you to
hasten to the playhouse and carry me the news of the play--don't fear to
tell me the worst; I have been in the world of letters for nearly twenty
years; I am not easily dismayed.”
“My dear friend,” said Steevens, “I have no intention of going to
the playhouse unless you are in my company--I promised so much to Dr.
Johnson. What, man, have you no consideration for your friends, leaving
yourself out of the question? Have you no consideration for your art,
sir?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that perhaps while you are walking here some question may arise
on the stage that you, and you only, can decide--are you willing to
allow the future of your comedy to depend upon the decision of Colman,
who is not the man to let pass a chance of proving himself to be a true
prophet? Come, sir, you have shown yourself to be a man, and a great
man, too, before to-night. Why should your courage fail you now when I
am convinced you are on the eve of achieving a splendid success?”
“It shall not--it shall not!” cried Goldsmith after a short pause.
“I'll not give in should the worst come to the worst. I feel that I
have something of a man in me still. The years that I have spent in
this battle have not crushed me into the earth. I'll go with you, my
friend--I'll go with you. Heaven grant that I may yet be in time to
avert disaster.”
They hurried together to Charing Cross, where a hackney coach was
obtainable. All the time it was lumbering along the uneven streets to
Covent Garden, Goldsmith was talking excitedly about the likelihood of
the play being wrecked through Colman's taking advantage of his absence
to insist on a scene being omitted--or, perhaps, a whole act; and
nothing that Steevens could say to comfort him had any effect.
When the vehicle turned the corner into Covent Garden he craned his
head out of the window and declared that the people were leaving the
playhouse--that his worst fears were realized.
“Nonsense!” cried Steevens, who had put his head out of the other
window. “The people you see are only the footmen and linkmen incidental
to any performance. What, man, would the coachmen beside us be dozing on
their boxes if they were waiting to be called? No, my friend, the comedy
has yet to be damned.”
When they got out of the coach Goldsmith hastened round to the stage
door, looking into the faces of the people who were lounging around, as
if to see in each of them the fate of his play written. He reached the
back of the stage and made for where Colman was standing, just as Quick,
in the part of Tony Lumpkin, was telling Mrs. Hardcastle that he had
driven her forty miles from her own house, when all the time she was
within twenty yards of it. In a moment he perceived that the lights
were far too strong; unless Mrs. Hardcastle was blind she could not have
failed to recognise the familiar features of the scene. The next moment
there came a hiss--a solitary hiss from the boxes.
“What's that, Mr. Colman?” whispered the excited author.
“Psha! sir,” said Colman brutally. “Why trouble yourself about a squib
when we have all been sitting on a barrel of gunpowder these two hours?”
“That's a lie,” said Shuter, who was in the act of going on the stage as
Mr. Hardcastle. “'Tis a lie, Dr. Goldsmith. The success of your play was
assured from the first.”
“By God! Mr. Colman, if it is a lie I'll never look on you as a friend
while I live!” said Goldsmith.