PUBLICATION OF THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD--OPINIONS CONCERNING IT--OF DR.
JOHNSON--OF ROGERS THE POET--OF GOETHE--ITS MERITS--EXQUISITE
EXTRACT--ATTACK BY KENRICK--REPLY--BOOK-BUILDING--PROJECT OF A COMEDY
The success of the poem of The Traveler, and the popularity which it had
conferred on its author, now roused the attention of the bookseller in
whose hands the novel of The Vicar of Wakefield had been slumbering for
nearly two long years. The idea has generally prevailed that it was Mr.
John Newbery to whom the manuscript had been sold, and much surprise has
been expressed that he should be insensible to its merit and suffer it to
remain unpublished, while putting forth various inferior writings by the
same author. This, however, is a mistake; it was his nephew, Francis
Newbery, who had become the fortunate purchaser. Still the delay is equally
unaccountable. Some have imagined that the uncle and nephew had business
arrangements together, in which this work was included, and that the elder
Newbery, dubious of its success, retarded the publication until the full
harvest of The Traveler should be reaped. Booksellers are prone to make
egregious mistakes as to the merit of works in manuscript; and to
undervalue, if not reject, those of classic and enduring excellence, when
destitute of that false brilliancy commonly called "effect." In the present
instance, an intellect vastly superior to that of either of the booksellers
was equally at fault. Dr. Johnson, speaking of the work to Boswell, some
time subsequent to its publication, observed, "I myself did not think it
would have had much success. It was written and sold to a bookseller
before The Traveler, but published after, so little expectation had the
bookseller from it. Had it been sold after The Traveler, he might have had
twice as much money; _though sixty guineas was no mean price_."
Sixty guineas for the Vicar of Wakefield! and this could be pronounced
_no mean_ price by Dr. Johnson, at that time the arbiter of British
talent, and who had had an opportunity of witnessing the effect of the work
upon the public mind; for its success was immediate. It came out on the
27th of March, 1766; before the end of May a second edition was called for;
in three months more a third; and so it went on, widening in a popularity
that has never flagged. Rogers, the Nestor of British literature, whose
refined purity of taste and exquisite mental organization rendered him
eminently calculated to appreciate a work of the kind, declared that of all
the books which, through the fitful changes of three generations, he had
seen rise and fall, the charm of the Vicar of Wakefield had alone continued
as at first; and could he revisit the world after an interval of many more
generations, he should as surely look to find it undiminished. Nor has its
celebrity been confined to Great Britain. Though so exclusively a picture
of British scenes and manners, it has been translated into almost every
language, and everywhere its charm has been the same. Goethe, the great
genius of Germany, declared in his eighty-first year that it was his
delight at the age of twenty, that it had in a manner formed a part of his
education, influencing his taste and feelings throughout life, and that he
had recently read it again from beginning to end--with renewed delight, and
with a grateful sense of the early benefit derived from it.
It is needless to expatiate upon the qualities of a work which has thus
passed from country to country, and language to language, until it is now
known throughout the whole reading world, and is become a household book in
every hand. The secret of its universal and enduring popularity is
undoubtedly its truth to nature, but to nature of the most amiable kind; to
nature such as Goldsmith saw it. The author, as we have occasionally shown
in the course of this memoir, took his scenes and characters in this as in
his other writings, from originals in his own motley experience; but he has
given them as seen through the medium of his own indulgent eye, and has set
them forth with the colorings of his own good head and heart. Yet how
contradictory it seems that this, one of the most delightful pictures of
home and homefelt happiness, should be drawn by a homeless man; that the
most amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the
married state should be drawn by a bachelor, who had been severed from
domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender, touching,
and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should have been made
by a man whose deficiency in all the graces of person and manner seemed to
mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex.
We cannot refrain from transcribing from the work a short passage
illustrative of what we have said, and which within a wonderfully small
compass comprises a world of beauty of imagery, tenderness of feeling,
delicacy and refinement of thought, and matchless purity of style. The two
stanzas which conclude it, in which are told a whole history of woman's
wrongs and sufferings, is, for pathos, simplicity, and euphony, a gem in
the language. The scene depicted is where the poor Vicar is gathering
around him the wrecks of his shattered family, and endeavoring to rally
them back to happiness.
"The next morning the sun arose with peculiar warmth for the season, so
that we agreed to breakfast together on the honeysuckle bank; where, while
we sat, my youngest daughter at my request joined her voice to the concert
on the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her
seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy
which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony,
soothes the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother, too, upon this
occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as
before. 'Do, my pretty Olivia,' cried she, 'let us have that melancholy air
your father was so fond of; your sister Sophy has already obliged us. Do,
child; it will please your old father.' She complied in a manner so
exquisitely pathetic as moved me.
"'When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy.
What art can wash her guilt away?
"'The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom--is to die.'"
Scarce had the Vicar of Wakefield made its appearance and been received
with acclamation than its author was subjected to one of the usual
penalties that attend success. He was attacked in the newspapers. In one of
the chapters he had introduced his ballad of the Hermit, of which, as we
have mentioned, a few copies had been printed some considerable time
previously for the use of the Countess of Northumberland. This brought
forth the following article in a fashionable journal of the day:
"_To the Printer of the 'St. James's Chronicle_.'
"Sir--In the Reliques of Ancient Poetry, published about two years ago, is
a very beautiful little balled called A Friar of Orders Gray. The ingenious
editor, Mr. Percy, supposes that the stanzas sung by Ophelia in the play of
Hamlet were parts of some ballad well known in Shakespeare's time, and from
these stanzas with the addition of one or two of his own to connect them,
he has formed the above-mentioned ballad; the subject of which is, a lady
comes to a convent to inquire for her love who had been driven there by her
disdain. She is answered by a friar that he is dead:
"'No, no, he is dead, gone to his death's bed.
He never will come again.'
"The lady weeps and laments her cruelty; the friar endeavors to comfort her
with morality and religion, but all in vain; she expresses the deepest
grief and the most tender sentiments of love, till at last the friar
discovers himself:
"'And lo! beneath this gown of gray
Thy own true love appears.'
"This catastrophe is very fine, and the whole, joined with the greatest
tenderness, has the greatest simplicity; yet, though this ballad was so
recently published in the Ancient Reliques, Dr. Goldsmith has been hardy
enough to publish a poem called The Hermit, where the circumstances and
catastrophe are exactly the same, only with this difference, that the
natural simplicity and tenderness of the original are almost entirely lost
in the languid smoothness and tedious paraphrase of the copy, which is as
short of the merits of Mr. Percy's ballad as the insipidity of negus is to
the genuine flavor of champagne.
"I am, sir, yours, etc., DETECTOR."
This attack, supposed to be by Goldsmith's constant persecutor, the
malignant Kenrick, drew from him the following note to the editor:
"Sir--As there is nothing I dislike so much as newspaper controversy,
particularly upon trifles, permit me to be as concise as possible in
informing a correspondent of yours that I recommended Blainville's travels
because I thought the book was a good one; and I think so still. I said I
was told by the bookseller that it was then first published; but in that it
seems I was misinformed, and my reading was not extensive enough to set me
right.
"Another correspondent of yours accuses me of having taken a ballad I
published some time ago, from one by the ingenious Mr. Percy. I do not
think there is any great resemblance between the two pieces in question. If
there be any, his ballad was taken from mine. I read it to Mr. Percy some
years ago; and he, as we both considered these things as trifles at best,
told me, with his usual good-humor, the next time I saw him, that he had
taken my plan to form the fragments of Shakespeare into a ballad of his
own. He then read me his little Cento, if I may so call it, and I highly
approved it. Such petty anecdotes as these are scarcely worth printing; and
were it not for the busy disposition of some of your correspondents, the
public should never have known that he owes me the hint of his ballad, or
that I am obliged to his friendship and learning for communications of a
much more important nature.
"I am, sir, yours, etc.,
"OLIVER GOLDSMITH."
The unexpected circulation of the Vicar of Wakefield enriched the
publisher, but not the author. Goldsmith no doubt thought himself entitled
to participate in the profits of the repeated editions; and a memorandum,
still extant, shows that he drew upon Mr. Francis Newbery, in the month of
June, for fifteen guineas, but that the bill was returned dishonored. He
continued therefore his usual job-work for the booksellers, writing
introductions, prefaces, and head and tail pieces for new works; revising,
touching up, and modifying travels and voyages; making compilations of
prose and poetry, and "building books," as he sportively termed it. These
tasks required little labor or talent, but that taste and touch which are
the magic of gifted minds. His terms began to be proportioned to his
celebrity. If his price was at anytime objected to, "Why, sir," he would
say, "it may seem large; but then a man may be many years working in
obscurity before his taste and reputation are fixed or estimated; and then
he is, as in other professions, only paid for his previous labors."
He was, however, prepared to try his fortune in a different walk of
literature from any he had yet attempted. We have repeatedly adverted to
his fondness for the drama; he was a frequent attendant at the theaters;
though, as we have shown, he considered them under gross mismanagement. He
thought, too, that a vicious taste prevailed among those who wrote for the
stage. "A new species of dramatic composition," says he, in one of his
essays, "has been introduced under the name of _sentimental comedy_,
in which the virtues of private life are exhibited, rather than the vices
exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind make our
interest in the piece. In these plays almost all the characters are good
and exceedingly generous; they are lavish enough of their tin money on the
stage; and though they want humor, have abundance of sentiment and feeling.
If they happen to have faults or foibles, the spectator is taught not only
to pardon, but to applaud them in consideration of the goodness of their
hearts; so that folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended, and the
comedy aims at touching our passions, without the power of being truly
pathetic. In this manner we are likely to lose one great source of
entertainment on the stage; for while the comic poet is invading the
province of the tragic muse, he leaves her lively sister quite neglected.
Of this, however, he is no ways solicitous, as he measures his fame by his
profits....
"Humor at present seems to be departing from the stage; and it will soon
happen that our comic players will have nothing left for it but a fine coat
and a song. It depends upon the audience whether they will actually drive
those poor merry creatures from the stage, or sit at a play as gloomy as at
the tabernacle. It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it
will be a just punishment, that when, by our being too fastidious, we have
banished humor from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art
of laughing."
Symptoms of reform in the drama had recently taken place. The comedy of the
Clandestine Marriage, the joint production of Colman and Garrick, and
suggested by Hogarth's inimitable pictures of "Marriage a la mode," had
taken the town by storm, crowded the theaters with fashionable audiences,
and formed one of the leading literary topics of the year. Goldsmith's
emulation was roused by its success. The comedy was in what he considered
the legitimate line, totally different from the sentimental school; it
presented pictures of real life, delineations of character and touches of
humor, in which he felt himself calculated to excel. The consequence was
that in the course of this year (1766), he commenced a comedy of the same
class, to be entitled the Good Natured Man, at which he diligently wrought
whenever the hurried occupation of "book building" allowed him leisure.