THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD."
[Sidenote: 1774--Death of Oliver Goldsmith]
In the early spring that followed upon the winter when the Mohawks of
Boston made tea with salt water, at a time when politicians were busy
fighting over the Boston Port Bill, and neither side dreamed of the
consequences that could come of a decision, one of the gentlest and
sweetest writers of the English speech passed quietly, and somewhat
unhappily, away from a world he had done so much to make happy. With
Oliver Goldsmith an epoch of literature came to an end, as the year
that saw his death ended an epoch in the history of the world. The
characteristic literature of the eighteenth century, the literature
that began with Swift and Addison, and Steele and Pope; that boasted
among its greatest the names of Sterne and Richardson, Smollett and
Fielding, came to its close with the genius of Goldsmith. With the new
conditions which were coming over the world a new literature was to be
created. Wordsworth was a child of four, at Cockermouth; Coleridge was
a child of four, at Bristol; over in Germany a young poet, whose name
was unknown in England, had been much influenced by Goldsmith's
immortal story, and was in his turn and time to have a very profound
influence over the literature of Goldsmith's adopted country. The year
of Goldsmith's death was the year in which the young Goethe published
those "Sorrows of Werther" which marked the birth of a new form of
expression in art.
Goldsmith was born in Ireland, at Pallas, in the county of Longford, in
the early November of 1728. He lived for over forty-five years a life
of poverty, of vagrancy, of squalor, of foolish dissipation, of
grotesque vanity, of an {168} industry as amazing as his improvidence,
of a native idleness that was successfully combated by a tireless
industry, of an amazing simplicity that was only rivalled by his
amazing genius. There were a great many contrasting and seemingly
incompatible elements in Goldsmith's queer composition, but his faults
were not of a kind to prevent men from finding him lovable, and,
whatever his faults were, they left no stain upon his writings.
The writings of Goldsmith are distinguished in English literature, and,
indeed, in the literature of the world, by their sweet pure humor,
fresh and clear and sparkling as a fountain whose edges the satyr's
hoof has never trampled. They charm by their humanity, by their tender
charity, by the nobility of their lesson, a nobility only heightened by
the intense sympathy with the struggles, and sorrows, and errors of
mankind. A new St. Martin of letters, he was ever ready to share his
mantle of pity with the sad and sinning. He had himself suffered so
much, and been so tempted and tested, and had retained throughout his
trials so much of the serenity of a child, that all his writings
breathe compassion for frailty and failure with something of a
schoolboy sense of brotherhood which softens even his satire. The
flames of London's fiery furnace had blazed and raged about him, but he
passed through them unconsumed. The age in which he lived was not an
age of exalted purity, the city wherein he dwelt was scarcely saintly.
He lived in some of the most evil days of the eighteenth century, but
his writings and his life escaped pollution. He was not a saint,
indeed; he was a spendthrift and he loved his glass, but he was never
tainted with the servile sins of cities. Through all the weltering
horror of Hogarth's London we seem to see him walk with something of
the freshness of his boyhood still shining on his face. The reflection
of the Irish skies was too bright upon his eyes to let them be dimmed
by the squalor and the shame of a squalid and shameful city.
[Sidenote: 1774--The friends of Goldsmith]
With the true instinct of his fine nature he made his friends and
companions among the wisest and highest of his time. His intimates and
companions were Edmund {169} Burke, and Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua
Reynolds. He had women friends too, as wisely chosen as the men--women
who were kind to him and admired him, women whose kindness and
admiration were worth the winning, women whose friendship brightened
and soothed a life that was darkened and vexed enough. Mary Horneck
and her sister were the stars of his life, his heroines, his idols, his
ideals. He has made Mary Horneck immortal as the "Jessamy Bride." In
his hours of poverty he was cheered by the thought of her; while he
lived he worshipped her, and when he died a lock of his hair was taken
from his coffin and given to her. Thackeray tells a touching little
story of the Jessamy Bride. She lived long after the death of the man
of genius who adored her, lived well into the nineteenth century, and
"Hazlitt saw her, an old lady, but beautiful still, in Northcote's
painting-room, who told the eager critic how proud she was always that
Goldsmith had admired her."
Goldsmith was a companionable being and loved all company that was not
vicious and depraved. He could be happy at the club in the society of
the great thinkers and teachers and wits of the time. He could be more
than happy at Barton, in the society of Mary and her sister. But he
could be happy too, in far humbler, far less romantic fellowship. "I
am fond of amusement," he declares in one of his most delightful
essays, "in whatever company it is to be found, and wit, though dressed
in rags, is ever pleasing to me." There was plenty of wit dressed in
rags drifting about the London of that day. Men of genius slept on
bulkheads and beneath arches, and starved for want of a guinea, or
haunted low taverns, or paced St. James's Square all night in
impecunious couples for sheer need of a lodging, cheering each other's
supperless mood with political conversations and declarations that, let
come what might come, they would never desert the Ministry. But
Goldsmith unearthed men of genius whose names nobody ever heard of, and
studied them and made merry with them, and transferred them to his
pages for us to make merry with more than a century after Goldsmith
{170} fell asleep. We may suspect that Goldsmith never really found
those wonderful beggars he chronicles. He did not discover them as
Cabot discovered America; he is their inventor, as the fancy of poets
invented the Fortunate Islands.
Goldsmith's strolling player is as real as Richard Savage, with whom he
is contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more presentable
personage. What a jolly philosophy is his about the delights of
beggary! It has all the humor of Rabelais with no touch of the
Touraine grossness. It has something of the wisdom of Aurelius, only
clad in homespun instead of the purple. The philosophy of contentment
was never more merrily nor more whimsically expressed. A synod of
sages could not formulate a scheme in praise of poverty more impressive
than the contagious humor of his light-hearted merriment. The
strolling player has the best of the argument, but he has it because he
is speaking with the persuasive magic of the tongue of Oliver Goldsmith.
The same pervading cheerfulness, the same sunny philosophy, which is,
however, by no means the philosophy of Pangloss, informs all his work.
Beau Tibbs boasting in his garret; Dr. Primrose in Newgate; the
good-natured man, seated between two bailiffs, and trying to converse
with his heart's idol as if nothing had happened; Mr. Hardcastle,
foiled for the five-hundredth time in the tale of Old Grouse in the Gun
Room; each is an example of Goldsmith's method and of Goldsmith's
manner. If Goldsmith did not enjoy while he lived all the admiration,
all the rewards that belonged of right to his genius, the generations
that have succeeded have made amends for the errors of their ancestors.
"She Stoops to Conquer" is still the most successful of the stock
comedies. If "The Good-Natured Man" can scarcely be said to have kept
the stage, it is still the delight of the student in his closet. What
satires are better known than the letters of the "Citizen of the
World"? What spot on the map is more familiar than Sweet Auburn? As
for the "Vicar of Wakefield," what profitable words could now be added
to {171} its praise? It has conquered the world, it is dear to every
country and known in every language, it has taken its place by
unquestionable right with the masterpieces of all time.
[Sidenote: 1774--Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson]
"Dr. Goldsmith," said his most famous friend of the man who was then
lying in the Temple earth--"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir, but he is so
no more." This epitaph has been quoted a thousand times, but it must
in no sense be taken as a summing-up of the dead man's career. It was
a rebuke, justly administered, to the critic who at such a moment could
have the heart to say that Oliver Goldsmith had been wild. Dr.
Johnson, who uttered the rebuke, put the same thought even more
profoundly in a letter addressed to Bennet Langton shortly after
Goldsmith's death. In this letter he announces Goldsmith's death,
speaks of his "folly of expense," and concludes by saying, "But let not
his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man." These simple
words are infinitely more impressive than the magniloquence of the
epitaph which Johnson wrote on Goldsmith.
Goldsmith lived in London and he died in London, and he lies buried in
the precincts of the Temple. The noise, and rattle, and roar of London
rave daily about his grave. Around it rolls the awful music of a great
city that has grown and swollen and extended its limits and multiplied
its population out of all resemblance to that little London where
Goldsmith lived and starved and made merry, and was loved, and dunned,
and sorrowed for. The body that first drew breath among the pleasant
Longford meadows, which seem to stretch in all directions to touch the
sky, lies at rest within the humming, jostling, liberties of the
Temple. It is perhaps fitting that the grave of one who all his life
loved men and rejoiced so much in companionship should be laid in a
place where the foot of man is almost always busy, where silence, when
it comes at all, comes only with the night.
There is not a space in the scope of this history to deal, otherwise
than incidentally, with the literature of England in the eighteenth
century. The whole Georgian era, from its dawn to its dusk, is rich in
splendid names in {172} letters as in art. The great inheritance from
the Augustan age of Anne, the anguish of Grub Street, the evolution of
the novel, the eloquence of the pulpit and the bar, the triumphs of
science, the controversies of scholars, the fortunes of the drama, the
speculations of philosophy, the vacillations of the pamphleteer, the
judgments of the critics, the achievements of historians--these are
themes whose intimate consideration is outside the range of this work's
purpose. All that is possible is here and there to linger a little in
the company of some dear and famous figure--a Swift, a Johnson, a
Goldsmith, a Sheridan--who stands above his fellows in the world's
renown or in our individual affection, who played while he lived his
conspicuous part on the great stage of public life, or who helped
conspicuously to influence public thought. The selection is, within
these limitations, inevitably arbitrary, and is given frankly as such.
Certain names assert themselves masterfully, and of these Goldsmith's
is one of the most masterful. He added images to daily life and common
thought as Bunyan did or Shakespeare. There is no more need to explain
Dr. Primrose than there is to explain Mr. Facing-both-ways, and if Beau
Tibbs is only less familiar as Osric, Tony Lumpkin is to the full as
familiar as Falstaff. Goldsmith himself is the lovable type of a class
that was often unlovely in the eighteenth century, the needy man of
letters. If he has his lodging in the Grub Street of Dreams, his
presence there brings sunlight into the squalid place, and an infinite
humor, an infinite charity compensate royally for a little finite folly
and finite vanity. In the great art he served and the great age he
adorned Goldsmith stands, not alone, but apart, with the very human
demigods.
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