LONDON
Young Oliver Goldsmith, diffident and with no adroitness of address,
was not one of those authors who can take publishers by storm, and
fame with a wave of the hand. He was a nervous man. Although one of
the most collected of writers, he had to be fully at his ease before,
in conversation or the common intercourse of society, he could be
himself and reveal that force of mind and invincibility of personality
that mark his influence and creates his charm. He knew and felt his
weakness. When Johnson narrated his adventures in a close and friendly
gossip with the King, Goldsmith said:
"Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I
should have done, for I should have bowed and stammered through the
whole of it."
Goldsmith's face must have shone in moments of animation, its very
ugliness gaining a beauty all its own, more lovable for that
transformation one smile creates. He may have had an uncouth
appearance and an awkward bearing. The charm and gentleness of such a
spirit as his must have outweighed accidents of form. Now we associate
an inevitable purity and tenderness with him and with all he ever did.
If he had a poor outward mien and fashion, men must have thought
nothing of this compared to the inward grace of the heart and
love-illumined soul of the man.
Alone in London, he had come to his fierce fight: not for fame, but
for bread. Through all his squalid wanderings in the hard times, and
all his sordid trials, he sustained his cheerfulness, and in a
selfless supremacy ever strove to bestow on other lives the faith and
courage his own bright heart never wholly lost. How he lived in these
early days in London no one knows, and the tale of want, care, and
humiliation incident to gnawing peril and privation made a story too
agonising for him, open as he was, ever to fully reveal. He said one
day very quietly: "When I lived among the beggars in Axe Lane."
He may have laughed as he said the words. He must have shuddered. The
laugh was a selfless sacrifice. The shudder was real and to the very
last too true, for painful memory was vivid. We cannot tell whether,
like Shakespeare, he held the reins of horses, standing outside
taverns and theatres; or whether he carried bags for pence, ran
errands, gambled for his bread, or begged for shelter. Here was a
sweet, weak, pure, and gentle, sympathetic lad, only a boy in heart
and strength, and not even a child in that hardness life demands,
stepping he knew not whither, meeting the world in an actual and
visible solitude, and a loneliness of soul beyond the force of words
to tell. There are those who, having passed their twentieth year, are
already men of mark and power. Not such a one was poor Noll. Through
ceaseless dependence and uncertainty in both his purpose and his
position in life, he tardily gained that dignity and validity that
attends the realisation of man's estate.
With Goldsmith now one eager and despairing quest for work followed
hard upon another, and disappointments in rapid and relentless
succession. After wandering on from door to door, and hope to its
scattering, and chance to its dispelling, he obtained his first
situation as a dispenser in a chemist's shop. He lost opportunities
and failed to create confidence, more than anything through the
forlornness of his appearance, and the too obvious simplicity of his
bearing. Then he heard of an old friend, a warm-hearted Edinburgh
student, a certain Dr. Sleigh. To this generous man he bent his steps.
As soon as he was recognized, he was received into the home of his
former companion, and welcomed with all that brotherliness of which
sterling friendship is capable.
The old apothecary, with whom Goldsmith worked as a dispenser for a
time, deserves the grateful honour that we now can pay his kindly
heart. His name was Jacobs. He appears to have been an old man of
benign mien and inclination. He recognized the superior learning and
credentials of his young assistant. He thought that a qualified doctor
should not be serving drugs in a shop, but in greater dignity visiting
his patients. Largely through this man's kindly exertions, and also
with a little help from Dr. Sleigh, who soon left London and was lost
to his former friend, and with the sympathy and good wishes of more
than one old Edinburgh comrade, remembered and met again, Goldsmith
was set up in a mean and meagre manner as a physician, in a very poor
and dingy neighbourhood--Bank Side, Southwark. The whole prospect was
neither pleasant nor propitious. Hidden in his desolute obscurity,
friends lost, for a time at all events, all thought of Goldsmith. The
poor doctor soon seemed quite alone, and, what was worse, forgotten.
From the moment that Oliver Goldsmith entered London, penury and
meanness had dogged his steps. It is piteous to dwell upon these
squalid scenes. We need not recall the second-hand wardrobe that
decked him out as a physician in this practice, unimaginably poor and
dark and dingy. Fancy cannot conceive a greater dreariness or deeper
destitution. He was so poor that his poorest patients felt compassion
for his even greater poverty. Seeing one day his doctor's pockets
bulging with papers, so that he looked like the man of letters in a
then clever and popular caricature, an invalid, a journeyman printer,
who had sought this physician's aid and advice, now feelingly
commended him to Samuel Richardson, his own master and employer, with
at first, at all events, apparently auspicious results. Leaving his
dubious practice, Goldsmith became proof reader to the printer,
publisher, and novelist who had also in his own good time befriended
the great Dr. Johnson. No ultimate advantage, however, accrued to
Goldsmith from this distinguished association with and employment by
one of the most successful authors of the day.
He met the poet Young, and other men. He never wrote for Richardson,
and soon left this place of books and business. His position can have
been neither dignified nor lucrative. The wanderer bent his weary
feet, neither knowing whither his steps might tend nor with the
wherewithal to meet the journey. He was almost starving in the
streets, when one day he met young Milner, another Edinburgh student,
who carried Noll off to his father, a learned Presbyterian divine, who
kept a school. Goldsmith then had, it seems, some vague dream about
being sent to the East to decipher ancient inscriptions, but in the
end he found occupation in Peckham, and not Palestine.
There is no particular reason, however wayward his studies, to
question that Goldsmith was, in the lighter order of that day, a
qualified physician. When he landed in England from the Continent in
all probability he had secreted in some loose pocket a foreign medical
diploma. Besides this certificate, granting him the right to practise,
but not the power to succeed, as a doctor, he carried other
papers--parts of poems, essays, notes for plays, and perhaps even then
the opening of a novel. He set great store on these precious papers.
He may have lost his diploma. He became an usher in Dr. Milner's
school at Peckham. He hated this work. In _The Vicar of Wakefield_, in
a few striking sentences, he shows the humiliations of the position.
Wherever we find him, he is always the same in the matter of worldly
prudence, and in his fondness for making those about him bright. He
spent his salary in giving treats to his pupils. The kindly
schoolmaster's wife said that she ought to keep Mr. Goldsmith's money
as well as the young gentlemen's. Dear Noll was full of fun and fine
humour for the boys about him, doing all he could for their delight,
and loving some like a brother. When years had passed and he had
attained his fame, he met one of his old scholars, knew him in an
instant, and although the lad had become a married man, was anxious,
as in the old days, to treat him at an apple-stall. Then suddenly he
said:
"Sam, have you seen my picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Have you seen
it, Sam? Have you got an engraving?"
Sam had not yet procured the picture.
"Sam," said Goldsmith, "if your picture had been published, I should
not have waited an hour without having it."
Despite his pranks with his pupils, this time was no happy period. The
unpleasantness of the office and the severities of the scorned and
profitless labours weighed sorely on him. Every collection of
schoolboys has its share of ineffaceable snobs. These were a trial to
the teacher. Amid his practical jokes with William the footboy, and
one merry-maker and another, there is still an underlying earnestness
in all and a reverence for the pure sentiment of the heart. At this
time, when asked whom he held the best commentator on the Scriptures,
Goldsmith replied very simply, "Common Sense."
The principal of the school, Dr. Milner, was one of the most sincere
of Goldsmith's friends. At the house of this good man, Griffiths, the
publisher, meeting Goldsmith, detected his abilities at once, and
found him the first opening for his literary labours. He gave him mere
hack-work on the _Monthly Review_. This was the Whig journal of the
day, and opposed later by its Tory rival, the _Critical Review_,
edited by Smollet, also physician, novelist, and historian. Leaving
Peckham, Goldsmith now lived for a while over the shop of his employer
in Paternoster Row, gaining shelter of a sort and board and lodging.
Poor as may have been the fare, and mean as must have been the
livelihood under the roof of Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths, Oliver Goldsmith,
escaping from these conditions of life, entered others that were for a
time, at all events, far worse. One cannot tell what he did, or where
he went, or how he lived. Near Salisbury Square some squalid garret
sheltered him. He tried to shun the common gaze and hide his very
whereabouts. He turned to translating, chance criticisms, and any
drudgery that came his way, and all to little purpose. He lived in
wretchedness and obscurity, bearing the weight of an increasing
poverty, until at last the very hope of bare subsistence perished.
On one dark and misty day, as Goldsmith, in his tattered and
threadbare clothes, sat pensive and dejected in his dingy, miserable
garret, rich in fancies and very poor in food, a merry rap upon the
door aroused the poet from his meditations. A young countryman, all
hope and health, had briskly announced his advent. This comer was not
one to wait without and need a bidding for his entrance. Oliver could
not hide himself completely. He was tracked down at last, and by none
other than his younger brother Charles. To the youth the emaciated
apparition of poor Oliver was indeed astounding. Charles had pictured
him already a prosperous and influential man of letters, who had but
to raise and wave his hand to confer work, wealth, and position, and
the possibilities of fame upon anyone whom he might lovingly patronise
and befriend. Imagine the disappointment.
"All in good time, my dear boy," said Oliver. "I shall be richer
by-and-by. Besides, you see, I am not in positive want. Addison, let
me tell you, wrote his poem of 'The Campaign' in a garret in the
Haymarket, three storeys high, and you see I am not come to that yet,
for I have only reached the second storey."
Some days later, just as suddenly as he had come, the younger brother
vanished. He had brought Oliver a breath of the old home. Charles made
his way to Jamaica, in all likelihood as a common sailor, and proved a
rover to the last. Darker shadows were to fall upon poor Noll through
still deeper experience of deprivation, misadventure and despair. The
days of doubt were passed at last, and in the end successes were
achieved in every sphere, unrivalled alike in their sublime heights
and vast variety.