A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,
Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,
And touched nothing that he did not adorn;
Of all the passions,
Whether smiles were to be moved or tears,
A powerful yet gentle master;
In genius, sublime, vivid, versatile,
In style, elevated, clear, elegant--
The love of companions,
The fidelity of friends,
And the veneration of readers,
Have by this monument honored the memory.
He was born in Ireland,
At a place called Pallas,
[In the parish] of Forney, [and county] of Longford,
On the 29th Nov., 1731,[*]
Educated at [the University of] Dublin,
And died in London,
4th April, 1774.
[Footnote *: Incorrect. See page 12.]
* * * * *
We shall not pretend to follow these anecdotes of the life of Goldsmith
with any critical dissertation on his writings; their merits have long
since been fully discussed, and their station in the scale of literary
merit permanently established. They have outlasted generations of works of
higher power and wider scope, and will continue to outlast succeeding
generations, for they have that magic charm of style by which works are
embalmed to perpetuity. Neither shall we attempt a regular analysis of the
character of the poet, but will indulge in a few desultory remarks in
addition to those scattered throughout the preceding chapters.
Never was the trite, because sage apothegm, that "The child is father to
the man," more fully verified than in the case of Goldsmith. He is shy,
awkward, and blundering in childhood, yet full of sensibility; he is a butt
for the jeers and jokes of his companions, but apt to surprise and confound
them by sudden and witty repartees; he is dull and stupid at his
tasks, yet an eager and intelligent devourer of the traveling tales and
campaigning stories of his half military pedagogue; he may be a dunce, but
he is already a rhymer; and his early scintillations of poetry awaken the
expectations of his friends. He seems from infancy to have been compounded
of two natures, one bright, the other blundering; or to have had fairy
gifts laid in his cradle by the "good people" who haunted his birthplace,
the old goblin mansion on the banks of the Inny.
He carries with him the wayward elfin spirit, if we may so term it,
throughout his career. His fairy gifts are of no avail at school, academy,
or college; they unfit him for close study and practical science, and
render him heedless of everything that does not address itself to his
poetical imagination and genial and festive feelings; they dispose him to
break away from restraint, to stroll about hedges, green lanes, and haunted
streams, to revel with jovial companions, or to rove the country like a
gypsy in quest of odd adventures.
As if confiding in these delusive gifts, he takes no heed of the present
nor care for the future, lays no regular and solid foundation of knowledge,
follows out no plan, adopts and discards those recommended by his friends,
at one time prepares for the ministry, next turns to the law, and then
fixes upon medicine. He repairs to Edinburgh, the great emporium of medical
science, but the fairy gifts accompany him; he idles and frolics away his
time there, imbibing only such knowledge as is agreeable to him; makes an
excursion to the poetical regions of the Highlands; and having walked the
hospitals for the customary time, sets off to ramble over the Continent, in
quest of novelty rather than knowledge. His whole tour is a poetical one.
He fancies he is playing the philosopher while he is really playing the
poet; and though professedly he attends lectures and visits foreign
universities, so deficient is he on his return, in the studies for which he
set out, that he fails in an examination as a surgeon's mate; and while
figuring as a doctor of medicine, is outvied on a point of practice by his
apothecary. Baffled in every regular pursuit, after trying in vain some of
the humbler callings of commonplace life, he is driven almost by chance to
the exercise of his pen, and here the fairy gifts come to his assistance.
For a long time, however, he seems unaware of the magic properties of that
pen; he uses it only as a makeshift until he can find a _legitimate_
means of support. He is not a learned man, and can write but meagerly and
at second-hand on learned subjects; but he has a quick convertible talent
that seizes lightly on the points of knowledge necessary to the
illustration of a theme; his writings for a time are desultory, the fruits
of what he has seen and felt, or what he has recently and hastily read; but
his gifted pen transmutes everything into gold, and his own genial nature
reflects its sunshine through his pages.
Still unaware of his powers he throws off his writings anonymously, to go
with the writings of less favored men; and it is a long time, and after a
bitter struggle with poverty and humiliation, before he acquires confidence
in his literary talent as a means of support, and begins to dream of
reputation.
From this time his pen is a wand of power in his hand, and he has only to
use it discreetly, to make it competent to all his wants. But discretion is
not a part of Goldsmith's nature; and it seems the property of these fairy
gifts to be accompanied by moods and temperaments to render their effect
precarious. The heedlessness of his early days; his disposition for social
enjoyment; his habit of throwing the present on the neck of the future,
still continue. His expenses forerun his means; he incurs debts on the
faith of what his magic pen is to produce, and then, under the pressure of
his debts, sacrifices its productions for prices far below their value. It
is a redeeming circumstance in his prodigality, that it is lavished oftener
upon others than upon himself; he gives without thought or stint, and is
the continual dupe of his benevolence and his trustfulness in human nature.
We may say of him as he says of one of his heroes, "He could not stifle the
natural impulse which he had to do good, but frequently borrowed money to
relieve the distressed; and when he knew not conveniently where to borrow,
he has been observed to shed tears as he passed through the wretched
suppliants who attended his gate."....
"His simplicity in trusting persons whom he had no previous reasons to
place confidence in, seems to be one of those lights of his character
which, while they impeach his understanding, do honor to his benevolence.
The low and the timid are ever suspicious; but a heart impressed with
honorable sentiments expects from others sympathetic sincerity." [Footnote:
Goldsmith's Life of Nashe.]
His heedlessness in pecuniary matters, which had rendered his life a
struggle with poverty even in the days of his obscurity, rendered the
struggle still more intense when his fairy gifts had elevated him into the
society of the wealthy and luxurious, and imposed on his simple and
generous spirit fancied obligations to a more ample and bounteous display.
"How comes it," says a recent and ingenious critic, "that in all the miry
paths of life which he had trod, no speck ever sullied the robe of his
modest and graceful muse. How amid all that love of inferior company, which
never to the last forsook him, did he keep his genius so free from every
touch of vulgarity?"
We answer that it was owing to the innate purity and goodness of his
nature; there was nothing in it that assimilated to vice and vulgarity.
Though his circumstances often compelled him to associate with the poor,
they never could betray him into companionship with the depraved. His
relish for humor and for the study of character, as we have before
observed, brought him often into convivial company of a vulgar kind; but he
discriminated between their vulgarity and their amusing qualities, or
rather wrought from the whole those familiar features of life which form
the staple of his most popular writings.
Much, too, of this intact purity of heart may be ascribed to the lessons of
his infancy under the paternal roof; to the gentle, benevolent, elevated,
unworldly maxims of his father, who "passing rich with forty pounds a
year," infused a spirit into his child which riches could not deprave nor
poverty degrade. Much of his boyhood, too, had been passed in the household
of his uncle, the amiable and generous Contarine; where he talked of
literature with the good pastor, and practiced music with his daughter, and
delighted them both by his juvenile attempts at poetry. These early
associations breathed a grace and refinement into his mind and tuned it up,
after the rough sports on the green, or the frolics at the tavern. These
led him to turn from the roaring glees of the club, to listen to the harp
of his cousin Jane; and from the rustic triumph of "throwing sledge," to a
stroll with his flute along the pastoral banks of the Inny.
The gentle spirit of his father walked with him through life, a pure and
virtuous monitor; and in all the vicissitudes of his career we find him
ever more chastened in mind by the sweet and holy recollections of the home
of his infancy.
It has been questioned whether he really had any religious feeling. Those
who raise the question have never considered well his writings; his Vicar
of Wakefield, and his pictures of the Village Pastor, present religion
under its most endearing forms, and with a feeling that could only flow
from the deep convictions of the heart. When his fair traveling companions
at Paris urged him to read the Church Service on a Sunday, he replied that
"he was not worthy to do it." He had seen in early life the sacred offices
performed by his father and his brother, with a solemnity which had
sanctified them in his memory; how could he presume to undertake such
functions? His religion has been called in question by Johnson and by
Boswell; he certainly had not the gloomy hypochondriacal piety of the one,
nor the babbling mouth-piety of the other; but the spirit of Christian
charity breathed forth in his writings and illustrated in his conduct give
us reason to believe he had the indwelling religion of the soul.
We have made sufficient comments in the preceding chapters on his conduct
in elevated circles of literature and fashion. The fairy gifts which took
him there were not accompanied by the gifts and graces necessary to sustain
him in that artificial sphere. He can neither play the learned sage with
Johnson, nor the fine gentleman with Beauclerc, though he has a mind
replete with wisdom and natural shrewdness, and a spirit free from
vulgarity. The blunders of a fertile but hurried intellect, and the awkward
display of the student assuming the man of fashion, fix on him a character
for absurdity and vanity which, like the charge of lunacy, it is hard to
disprove, however weak the grounds of the charge and strong the facts in
opposition to it.
In truth, he is never truly in his place in these learned and fashionable
circles, which talk and live for display. It is not the kind of society he
craves. His heart yearns for domestic life; it craves familiar, confiding
intercourse, family firesides, the guileless and happy company of children;
these bring out the heartiest and sweetest sympathies of his nature.
"Had it been his fate," says the critic we have already quoted, "to meet a
woman who could have loved him, despite his faults, and respected him
despite his foibles, we cannot but think that his life and his genius would
have been much more harmonious; his desultory affections would have been
concentered, his craving self-love appeased, his pursuits more settled, his
character more solid. A nature like Goldsmith's, so affectionate, so
confiding--so susceptible to simple, innocent enjoyments--so dependent on
others for the sunshine of existence, does not flower if deprived of the
atmosphere of home."
The cravings of his heart in this respect are evident, we think, throughout
his career; and if we have dwelt with more significancy than others upon
his intercourse with the beautiful Horneck family, it is because we fancied
we could detect, amid his playful attentions to one of its members, a
lurking sentiment of tenderness, kept down by conscious poverty and a
humiliating idea of personal defects. A hopeless feeling of this kind--the
last a man would communicate to his friends--might account for much of that
fitfulness of conduct, and that gathering melancholy, remarked, but not
comprehended by his associates, during the last year or two of his life;
and may have been one of the troubles of the mind which aggravated his last
illness, and only terminated with his death.
We shall conclude these desultory remarks with a few which have been used
by us on a former occasion. From the general tone of Goldsmith's biography,
it is evident that his faults, at the worst, were but negative, while his
merits were great and decided. He was no one's enemy but his own; his
errors, in the main, inflicted evil on none but himself, and were so
blended with humorous, and even affecting circumstances, as to disarm anger
and conciliate kindness. Where eminent talent is united to spotless virtue,
we are awed and dazzled into admiration, but our admiration is apt to be
cold and reverential; while there is something in the harmless infirmities
of a good and great, but erring individual, that pleads touchingly to our
nature; and we turn more kindly toward the object of our idolatry, when we
find that, like ourselves, he is mortal and is frail. The epithet so often
heard, and in such kindly tones, of "Poor Goldsmith," speaks volumes. Few
who consider the real compound of admirable and whimsical qualities which
form his character would wish to prune away its eccentricities, trim its
grotesque luxuriance, and clip it down to the decent formalities of rigid
virtue. "Let not his frailties be remembered," said Johnson; "he was a very
great man." But, for our part, we rather say "Let them be remembered,"
since their tendency is to endear; and we question whether he himself would
not feel gratified in hearing his reader, after dwelling with admiration on
the proofs of his greatness, close the volume with the kind-hearted phrase,
so fondly and familiarly ejaculated, of "POOR GOLDSMITH."