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.”