Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Sankar Viswanathan,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
English Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY
GOLDSMITH
BY
WILLIAM BLACK
London
MACMILLAN AND CO
1878
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
CHAPTER III.
IDLENESS, AND FOREIGN TRAVEL
CHAPTER IV.
EARLY STRUGGLES.--HACK-WRITING
CHAPTER V.
BEGINNING OF AUTHORSHIP.--THE BEE
CHAPTER VI.
PERSONAL TRAITS
CHAPTER VII.
THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.--BEAU NASH
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ARREST
CHAPTER IX.
THE TRAVELLER
CHAPTER X.
MISCELLANEOUS WRITING
CHAPTER XI.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD
CHAPTER XII.
THE GOOD-NATURED MAN
CHAPTER XIII.
GOLDSMITH IN SOCIETY
CHAPTER XIV.
THE DESERTED VILLAGE
CHAPTER XV.
OCCASIONAL WRITINGS
CHAPTER XVI.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
CHAPTER XVII.
INCREASING DIFFICULTIES.--THE END
* * * * *
GOLDSMITH
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
"Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom."
So wrote Oliver Goldsmith; and surely among those who have earned the
world's gratitude by this ministration he must be accorded a
conspicuous place. If, in these delightful writings of his, he mostly
avoids the darker problems of existence--if the mystery of the tragic
and apparently unmerited and unrequited suffering in the world is
rarely touched upon--we can pardon the omission for the sake of the
gentle optimism that would rather look on the kindly side of life.
"You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel
sings to you," says Mr. Thackeray. "Who could harm the kind vagrant
harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon save the harp on
which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and humble,
young and old, the captains in the tents, or the soldiers round the
fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he
stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty." And it is to be
suspected--it is to be hoped, at least--that the cheerfulness which
shines like sunlight through Goldsmith's writings, did not altogether
desert himself even in the most trying hours of his wayward and
troubled career. He had, with all his sensitiveness, a fine
happy-go-lucky disposition; was ready for a frolic when he had a
guinea, and, when he had none, could turn a sentence on the humorous
side of starvation; and certainly never attributed to the injustice or
neglect of society misfortunes the origin of which lay nearer home.
Of course, a very dark picture might be drawn of Goldsmith's life; and
the sufferings that he undoubtedly endured have been made a whip with
which to lash the ingratitude of a world not too quick to recognise
the claims of genius. He has been put before us, without any brighter
lights to the picture, as the most unfortunate of poor devils; the
heart-broken usher; the hack ground down by sordid booksellers; the
starving occupant of successive garrets. This is the aspect of
Goldsmith's career which naturally attracts Mr. Forster. Mr. Forster
seems to have been haunted throughout his life by the idea that
Providence had some especial spite against literary persons; and that,
in a measure to compensate them for their sad lot, society should be
very kind to them, while the Government of the day might make them
Companions of the Bath or give them posts in the Civil Service. In the
otherwise copious, thorough, and valuable _Life and Times of Oliver
Goldsmith_, we find an almost humiliating insistance on the complaint
that Oliver Goldsmith did not receive greater recognition and larger
sums of money from his contemporaries. Goldsmith is here "the poor
neglected sizar"; his "marked ill-fortune" attends him constantly; he
shares "the evil destinies of men of letters"; he was one of those who
"struggled into fame without the aid of English institutions"; in
short, "he wrote, and paid the penalty." Nay, even Christianity itself
is impeached on account of the persecution suffered by poor Goldsmith.
"There had been a Christian religion extant for seventeen-hundred and
fifty-seven years," writes Mr. Forster, "the world having been
acquainted, for even so long, with its spiritual necessities and
responsibilities; yet here, in the middle of the eighteenth century,
was the eminence ordinarily conceded to a spiritual teacher, to one of
those men who come upon the earth to lift their fellow-men above its
miry ways. He is up in a garret, writing for bread he cannot get, and
dunned for a milkscore he cannot pay." That Christianity might have
been worse employed than in paying the milkman's score is true enough,
for then the milkman would have come by his own; but that
Christianity, or the state, or society should be scolded because an
author suffers the natural consequences of his allowing his
expenditure to exceed his income, seems a little hard. And this is a
sort of writing that is peculiarly inappropriate in the case of
Goldsmith, who, if ever any man was author of his own misfortunes, may
fairly have the charge brought against him. "Men of genius," says Mr.
Forster, "can more easily starve, than the world, with safety to
itself, can continue to neglect and starve them." Perhaps so; but the
English nation, which has always had a regard and even love for
Oliver Goldsmith, that is quite peculiar in the history of literature,
and which has been glad to overlook his faults and follies, and eager
to sympathise with him in the many miseries of his career, will be
slow to believe that it is responsible for any starvation that
Goldsmith may have endured.
However, the key-note has been firmly struck, and it still vibrates.
Goldsmith was the unluckiest of mortals, the hapless victim of
circumstances. "Yielding to that united pressure of labour, penury,
and sorrow, with a frame exhausted by unremitting and ill-rewarded
drudgery, Goldsmith was indebted to the forbearance of creditors for a
peaceful burial." But what, now, if some foreigner strange to the
traditions of English literature--some Japanese student, for example,
or the New Zealander come before his time--were to go over the
ascertained facts of Goldsmith's life, and were suddenly to announce
to us, with the happy audacity of ignorance, that he, Goldsmith, was a
quite exceptionally fortunate person? "Why," he might say, "I find
that in a country where the vast majority of people are born to
labour, Oliver Goldsmith was never asked to do a stroke of work
towards the earning of his own living until he had arrived at man's
estate. All that was expected of him, as a youth and as a young man,
was that he should equip himself fully for the battle of life. He was
maintained at college until he had taken his degree. Again and again
he was furnished with funds for further study and foreign travel; and
again and again he gambled his opportunities away. The constant
kindness of his uncle only made him the best begging-letter-writer
the world has seen. In the midst of his debt and distress as a
bookseller's drudge, he receives £400 for three nights' performance of
_The Good-Natured Man_; he immediately purchases chambers in Brick
Court for £400; and forthwith begins to borrow as before. It is true
that he died owing £2000, and was indebted to the forbearance of
creditors for a peaceful burial; but it appears that during the last
seven years of his life he had been earning an annual income
equivalent to £800 of English currency.[1] He was a man liberally and
affectionately brought up, who had many relatives and many friends,
and who had the proud satisfaction--which has been denied to many men
of genius--of knowing for years before he died that his merits as a
writer had been recognised by the great bulk of his countrymen. And
yet this strange English nation is inclined to suspect that it treated
him rather badly; and Christianity is attacked because it did not pay
Goldsmith's milkscore."
[Footnote 1: The calculation is Lord Macaulay's: see his _Biographical_
_Essays_.]
Our Japanese friend may be exaggerating; but his position is after all
fairly tenable. It may at least be looked at, before entering on the
following brief _résumé_ of the leading facts in Goldsmith's life, if
only to restore our equanimity. For, naturally, it is not pleasant to
think that any previous generation, however neglectful of the claims
of literary persons (as compared with the claims of such wretched
creatures as physicians, men of science, artists, engineers, and so
forth) should so cruelly have ill-treated one whom we all love now.
This inheritance of ingratitude is more than we can bear. Is it true
that Goldsmith was so harshly dealt with by those barbarian ancestors
of ours?