STERNE, GOLDSMITH, AND MACKENZIE.
The Subjective School. Sterne--Sermons. Tristram Shandy. Sentimental
Journey. Oliver Goldsmith. Poems--The Vicar. Histories, and Other
Works. Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling.
THE SUBJECTIVE SCHOOL.
In the same age, and inspired by similar influences, there sprang up a
widely-different school of novelists, which has been variously named as
the Sentimental and the Subjective School. Richardson and Fielding
depicted what they saw around them objectively, rather than the
impressions made upon their individual sensitiveness. Both Sterne and
Goldsmith were eminently subjective. They stand as a transparent medium
between their works and the reader. The medium through which we see
_Tristram Shandy_ is a double lens,--one part of which is the distorted
mind of the author, and the other the nondescript philosophy which he
pilfered from Rabelais and Burton. The glass through which the _Vicar of
Wakefield_ is shown us is the good-nature and loving heart of Goldsmith,
which brighten and gladden every creation of his pen. Thus it is that two
men, otherwise essentially unlike, appear together as representatives of a
school which was at once sentimental and subjective.
STERNE.--Lawrence Sterne was the son of an officer in the British army,
and was born, in 1713, at Clonmel, in Ireland, where his father was
stationed.
His father died not long afterwards, at Gibraltar, from the effect of a
wound which he had received in a duel; and it is indicative of the _code
of honor_ in that day, that the duel was about a goose at the mess-table!
What little Lawrence learned in his brief military experience was put to
good use afterwards in his army reminiscences and portraitures in
_Tristram Shandy_. No doubt My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are sketches
from his early recollections. Aided by his mother's relations, he studied
at Cambridge, and afterwards, without an inward call, but in accordance
with the custom of the day, he entered into holy orders, and was presented
to a living, of which he stood very much in need.
HIS SERMONS.--With no spirit for parochial work, it must be said that he
published very forcible and devout sermons, and set before his people and
the English world a pious standard of life, by which, however, he did not
choose to measure his own: he preached, but did not practise. In a letter
to Mr. Foley, he says: "I have made a good campaign in the field of the
literati: ... two volumes of sermons which I shall print very soon will
bring me a considerable sum.... 'Tis but a crown for sixteen sermons--dog
cheap; but I am in quest of honor, not money."
These discourses abound in excellent instruction and in pithy expressions;
but it is painful to see how often his pointed rebukes are undesignedly
aimed at his own conduct. In one of them he says: "When such a man tells
you that a thing goes against his conscience, always believe he means
exactly the same thing as when he tells you it goes against his stomach--a
present want of appetite being generally the true cause of both." In his
discourse on _The Forgiveness of Injuries_, we have the following striking
sentiment: "The brave only know how to forgive: it is the most refined and
generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at. Cowards have done
good and kind actions; cowards have even fought, nay, sometimes even
conquered; but a coward never forgave." All readers of _Tristram Shandy_
will recall his sermon on the text, "For we trust we have a good
conscience," so affecting to Corporal Trim and so overwhelming to Dr.
Slop.
But if his sermons are so pious and good, we look in vain into his
entertaining _Letters_ for a corresponding piety in his life. They are
witty, jolly, occasionally licentious. They touch and adorn every topic
except religion; and so it may be feared that all his religion was
written, printed, bound, and sold by subscription, in those famous
sermons, sixteen for a crown--"dog cheap!"
TRISTRAM SHANDY.--In 1759 appeared the first part of _Tristram Shandy_--a
strange, desultory work, in which many of the curious bits of philosophy
are taken from Montaigne, Burton, Rabelais, and others; but which has,
besides, great originality in the handling and in the portraiture of
characters. Much of what Sterne borrowed from these writers passed for his
own in that day, when there were comparatively few readers of the authors
mentioned. As to the charge of plagiarism, we may say that Sterne's hero
is like the _Gargantua_ of Rabelais in many particulars; but he is a man
instead of a monster; while the chapter on _Hobby-Horses_ is a
reproduction, in a new form of crystallization, of _Gargantua's wooden
horses_.
So, too, the entire theological cast of _Tristram Shandy_ is that of the
sixteenth century;--questions before the Sorbonne, the use of
excommunication, and the like. Dr. Slop, the Roman Catholic surgeon of the
family, is but a weak mouthpiece of his Church in the polemics of the
story; for Sterne was a violent opponent of the Church of Rome in story as
well as in sermon; and Obadiah, the stupid man-servant, is the lay figure
who receives the curses which Dr. Slop reads,--"cursed in house and
stable, garden and field and highway, in path or in wood, in the water or
in the church." Whether the doctor was in earnest or not, Obadiah paid
him fully by upsetting him and his pony with the coach-horse.
But in spite of the resemblance to Rabelais and a former age, it must be
allowed that _Tristram Shandy_ contains many of the richest pictures and
fairest characters of the age in which it was written. Rural England is
truthfully presented, and the political cast of the day is shown in his
references to the war in Flanders. Among the sterling original portraits
are those of Mr. Shandy, the country gentleman, controversial and
consequential; Mrs. Shandy, the nonentity,--the Amelia Osborne and Mrs.
Nickleby of her day; Yorick, the lukewarm, time-serving priest--Sterne
himself: and these are only supplementary characters.
The sieges of towns in the Low Countries, then going on, are pleasantly
connected with that most exquisite of characters, _my Uncle Toby_, who has
a fortification in his garden,--sentry-box, cannon, and all,--and who
follows the great movement on this petty scale from day to day, as the
bulletins come in from the seat of war.
The _Widow Wadman_, with her artless wiles, and the "something in her
eye," makes my Uncle Toby--who protests he can see nothing in the
white--look, not without peril, "with might and main into the pupil." Ah,
that sentry-box and the widow's tactics might have conquered many a more
wary man than my Uncle Toby! and yet my Uncle Toby escaped.
Now, all these are real English characters, sketched from life by the hand
of genius, and they become our friends and acquaintances forever. It seems
as though Sterne, after a long and close study of Rabelais and Burton, had
fancied that, with their aid, he might write a money-making book; but his
own genius, rising superior to the plagiarism, took the project out of his
venal hands; and from the antique learning and the incongruities which he
had heaped together, bright and beautiful forms sprang forth like genii
from the mine, to subsidize the tears and laughter of all future time.
What an exquisite creation is my Uncle Toby!--a soldier in the van of
battle, a man of honor and high tone in every-day life, a kind brother, a
good master to Corporal Trim, simple as a child, benevolent as an angel.
"Go, poor devil," quoth he to the fly which buzzed about his nose all
dinner-time, "get thee gone; why should I hurt thee? This world is surely
wide enough to hold both thee and me!"
And as for Corporal Trim, he is a host in himself. There is in the English
literary portrait-gallery no other Uncle Toby, there is no other Corporal
Trim. Hazlitt has not exaggerated in saying that the _Story of Le Fevre_
is perhaps the finest in the English language. My Uncle Toby's conduct to
the dying officer is the perfection of loving-kindness and charity.
THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.--Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_, although
charmingly written,--and this is said in spite of the preference of such a
critic as Horace Walpole,--will not compare with _Tristram Shandy_: it is
left unfinished, and is constantly suggestive of licentiousness.
Sterne's English is excellent and idiomatic, and has commended his works
to the ordinary reader, who shrinks from the hyperlatinism of the time
represented so strongly by Dr. Johnson and his followers. His wit, if
sometimes artificial, is always acute; his sentiment is entirely
artificial; "he is always protruding his sensibility, trying to play upon
you as upon an instrument; more concerned that you should acknowledge his
power than have any depth of feeling." Thackeray, whose opinion is just
quoted, calls him "a great jester, not a great humorist." He had lived a
careless, self-indulgent life, and was no honor to his profession. His
death was like a retribution. In a mean lodging, with no friends but his
bookseller, he died suddenly from hemorrhage. His funeral was hasty, and
only attended by two persons; his burial was in an obscure graveyard; and
his body was taken up by corpse-snatchers for the dissecting-room of the
professor of anatomy at Cambridge,--alas, poor Yorick!
OLIVER GOLDSMITH.--We have placed Goldsmith in immediate connection with
Sterne as, like him, of the Subjective School, in his story of the _Vicar
of Wakefield_ and his numerous biographical and prose sketches; but he
belongs to more than one literary school of his period. He was a poet, an
essayist, a dramatist, and an historian; a writer who, in the words of his
epitaph,--written by Dr. Johnson, and with no extravagant
eulogium,--touched all subjects, and touched none that he did not
adorn,--_nullum quod tetigit non ornavit_. His life was a strange
melodrama, so varied with laughter and tears, so checkered with fame and
misfortune, so resounding with songs pathetic and comic, that, were he an
unknown hero, his adventures would be read with pleasure by all persons of
sensibility. There is no better illustration of the _subjective_ in
literature. It is the man who is presented to us in his works, and who can
no more be disjoined from them than the light from the vase, the beauties
of which it discloses. As an essayist, he was of the school of Addison and
Steele; but he has more ease of style and more humor than his teachers. As
a dramatist, he had many and superior competitors in his own vein; and yet
his plays still occupy the stage. As an historian, he was fluent but
superficial; and yet the charm of his style and the easy flow of his
narrative, have given his books currency as manuals of instruction. And
although as a writer of fiction, or of truth gracefully veiled in the
garments of fiction, he stands unrivalled in his beautiful and touching
story of the incorruptible _Vicar_, yet this is his only complete story,
and presents but one side of his literary character. Considering him first
as a poet, we shall find that he is one of the Transition School, but that
he has a beautiful originality: his poems appeal not to the initiated
alone, but to human nature in all its conditions and guises; they are
elevated and harmonious enough for the most fastidious taste, and simple
and artless enough to please the rustic and the child. To say that he is
the most popular writer in the whole course of English Literature thus
far, is hardly to overstate his claims; and the principal reason is that,
with a blundering and improvident nature, a want of dignity, a lack of
coherence, he had a great heart, alive to human suffering; he was generous
to a fault, true to the right, and ever seeking, if constantly failing, to
direct and improve his own life, and these good characteristics are
everywhere manifest in his works. A brief recital of the principal events
in his career will throw light upon his works, and will do the best
justice to his peculiar character.
Oliver Goldsmith was born at the little village of Pallas, in Ireland,
where his father was a poor curate, on the 10th of November, 1728. There
were nine children, of whom he was the fifth. His father afterwards moved
to Lissoy, which the poet described, in his _Deserted Village_, as
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain.
As his father was entirely unable to educate so numerous a family,
Goldsmith owed his education partly to his uncle, the Rev. Thomas
Contarini, and in part to his brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, whom he
cherished with the sincerest affection. An attack of the small-pox while
he was a boy marked his face, and he was to most persons an
unprepossessing child. He was ill-treated at school by larger boys, and
afterwards at Trinity College, Dublin, which he entered as a sizar, by his
tutor. He was idle, careless, and improvident: he left college without
permission, but was taken back by his brother, and was finally graduated
with a bachelor's degree, in 1749. His later professional studies were
spasmodic and desultory: he tried law and medicine, and more than once
gained a scanty support by teaching. Seized with a rambling spirit, he
went to the Continent, and visited Holland, France, Germany, Switzerland,
and Italy; sometimes gaining a scanty livelihood by teaching English, and
sometimes wandering without money, depending upon his flute to win a
supper and bed from the rustics who lived on the highway. He obtained, it
is said, the degree of Doctor of Medicine at Padua; and on his return to
England, he went before a board of examiners to obtain the position of
surgeon's mate in the army or navy. He was at this time so poor that he
was obliged to borrow a suit of clothes to make a proper appearance before
the examiners. He failed in his examination, and then, in despair, he
pawned the borrowed clothes, to the great anger of the publisher who had
lent them. This failure in his medical examination, unfortunate as it then
seemed, secured him to literature. From that time his pen was constantly
busy for the reviews and magazines. His first work was _An Inquiry into
the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe_, which, at least, prepared
the way for his future efforts. This appeared in 1759, and is
characterized by general knowledge and polish of style.
HIS POEMS.--In 1764 he published _The Traveller_, a moralizing poem upon
the condition of the people under the European governments. It was at once
and entirely successful; philosophical, elegant, and harmonious, it is
pitched in a key suited to the capacity of the world at large; and as, in
the general comparison of nations, he found abundant reason for lauding
England, it was esteemed patriotic, and was on that account popular. Many
of its lines have been constantly quoted since.
In 1770 appeared his _Deserted Village_, which was even more popular than
_The Traveller_; nor has this popularity flagged from that time down to
the present day. It is full of exquisite pictures of rural life and
manners. It is what it claims to be,--not an attempt at high art or epic,
but a gallery of cabinet pictures of rare finish and detail, painted by
the poet's heart and appealing to the sensibility of every reader. The
world knows it by heart,--the portraiture of the village schoolmaster and
his school; the beautiful picture of the country parson:
A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year.
This latter is a worthy companion-piece to Chaucer's "poor persoune," and
is, besides, a filial tribute to Goldsmith's father. So real are the
characters and scenes, that the poem has been a popular subject for the
artist. If in _The Traveller_ he has been philosophical and didactic, in
the _Deserted Village_ he is only descriptive and tender. In no work is
there a finer spirit of true charity, the love of man for God's
sake,--like God himself, "no respecter of persons."
While in form and versification he is like Pope and the Artificial School,
he has the sensibility to nature of Thomson, and the simplicity of feeling
and thought of Wordsworth; and thus he stands between the two great poetic
periods, partaking of the better nature of both.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD.--Between the appearance of these two poems, in
1766, came forth that nonpareil of charming stories, _The Vicar of
Wakefield_. It is so well known that we need not enter into an analysis of
it. It is the story of a good vicar, of like passions with ourselves; not
wanting in vanity and impetuosity, but shining in his Christian virtue
like a star in the midst of accumulating misfortunes,--a man of immaculate
honor and undying faith, preaching to his fellow-prisoners in the jail,
surveying death without fear, and at last, like Job, restored to
happiness, and yet maintaining his humility. It does not seem to have been
constructed according to artificial rules, but rather to have been told
extemporaneously, without effort and without ambition; and while this very
fact has been the cause of some artistic faults and some improbabilities,
it has also given it a peculiar charm, by contrast with such purely
artificial constructions as the _Rasselas_ of Johnson.
So doubtful was the publisher, who had bought the manuscript for £60, that
he held it back for two years, until the name of the author had become
known through _The Traveller_, and was thus a guarantee for its success.
The _Vicar of Wakefield_ has also an additional value in its delineation
of manners, persons, and conditions in that day, and in its strictures
upon the English penal law, in such terms and with such suggestions as
seem a prophecy of the changes which have since taken place.
HISTORIES, AND OTHER WORKS.--Of Goldsmith's various histories it may be
said that they are of value for the clear, if superficial, presentation of
facts, and for their charm of style.
The best is, without doubt, _The History of England_; but the _Histories
of Greece and Rome_, re-edited, are still used as text-books in many
schools. The _Vicar_ has been translated into most of the modern
languages, and imitated by many writers since.
As an essayist, Goldsmith has been a great enricher of English history.
His Chinese letters--for the idea of which he was indebted to the _Lettres
Persanes_ of Montesquieu--describe England in his day with the same
_vraisemblance_ which we have noticed in _The Spectator_. These were
afterwards collected and published in a volume entitled _The Citizen of
the World_. And besides the pleasure of biography, and the humor of the
presentment, his _Life of Beau Nash_ introduces us to Bath and its
frequenters with historical power. The life at the Spring is one and a
very valuable phase of English society.
As a dramatist, he was more than equalled by Sheridan; but his two plays,
_The Good-Natured Man_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_, are still favorites
upon the stage.
The irregularities of Goldsmith's private life seem to have been rather
defects in his character than intentional wrong-doings. Generous to a
fault, squandering without thought what was due to his creditors, losing
at play, he lived in continual pecuniary embarrassment, and died unhappy,
with a debt of £1000, the existence of which led Johnson to ejaculate,
"Was ever poet so trusted before?" He lived a bachelor; and the conclusion
seems forced upon us that had he married a woman who could have controlled
him, he, would have been a happier and more respectable man, but perhaps
have done less for literature than he did.
While Goldsmith was a type and presenter of his age, and while he took no
high flights in the intellectual realms, he so handled what the age
presented that he must be allowed the claim of originality, both in his
poems and in the _Vicar_; and he has had, even to the present day, hosts
of imitators. Poems on college gala-days were for a long time faint
reflections of his _Traveller_, and simple, causal stories of quiet life
are the teeming progeny of the _Vicar_, in spite of the Whistonian
controversy, and the epitaph of his living wife.
A few of his ballads and songs display great lyric power, but the most of
his poetry is not lyric; it is rather a blending of the pastoral and epic
with rare success. His minor poems are few, but favorites. Among these is
the beautiful ballad entitled _Edwin and Angelina_, or _The Hermit_, which
first appeared in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, but which has since been
printed separately among his poems. Of its kind and class it has no
superior. _Retaliation_ is a humorous epitaph upon his friends and
co-literati, hitting off their characteristics with truth and point; and
_The Haunch of Venison_--upon which he did not dine--is an amusing
incident which might have happened to any Londoner like himself, but which
no one could have related so well as he.
He died in 1774, at the age of forty-five; but his fame--his better
life--is more vigorous than ever. Washington Irving, whose writings are
similar in style to those of Goldsmith, has extended and perpetuated his
reputation in America by writing his Biography; a charming work, many
touches of which seem almost autobiographical, as displaying the
resemblance between the writer and his subject.
MACKENZIE.--From Sterne and Goldsmith we pass to Mackenzie, who, if not a
conscious imitator of the former, is, at least, unconsciously formed upon
the model of Sterne, without his genius, but also without his coarseness:
in the management of his narrative, he is a medium between Sterne and
Walter Scott; indeed, from his long life, he saw the period of both these
authors, and his writings partake of the characteristics of both.
Henry Mackenzie was born at Edinburgh, in August, 1745, and lived until
1831, to the ripe age of eighty-six. He was educated at the University of
Edinburgh, and afterwards studied law. He wrote some strong political
pamphlets in favor of the Pitt government, for which he was rewarded with
the office of comptroller of the taxes, which he held to the day of his
death.
THE MAN OF FEELING.--In 1771 the world was equally astonished and
delighted by the appearance of his first novel, _The Man of Feeling_. In
this there are manifest tokens of his debt to Sterne's _Sentimental
Journey_, in the journey of Harley, in the story of the beggar and his
dog, and in somewhat of the same forced sensibility in the account of
Harley's death.
In 1773 appeared his _Man of the World_ which was in some sort a sequel to
the _Man of Feeling_, but which wearies by the monotony of the plot.
In 1777 he published _Julia de Roubigné_, which, in the opinion of many,
shares the palm with his first novel: the plot is more varied than that of
the second, and the language is exceedingly harmonious--elegiac prose. The
story is plaintive and painful: virtue is extolled, but made to suffer, in
a domestic tragedy, which all readers would be glad to see ending
differently.
At different times Mackenzie edited _The Mirror_ and _The Lounger_, and he
has been called the restorer of the Essay. His story of the venerable _La
Roche_, contributed to _The Mirror_, is perhaps the best specimen of his
powers as a sentimentalist: it portrays the influence of Christianity, as
exhibited in the very face of infidelity, to support the soul in the
sorest of trials--the death of an only and peerless daughter.
His contributions to the above-named periodicals were very numerous and
popular.
The name of his first novel was applied to himself as a man. He was known
as the _man of feeling_ to the whole community. This was a misnomer: he
was kind and affable; his evening parties were delightful; but he had
nothing of the pathetic or sentimental about him. On the contrary, he was
humorous, practical, and worldly-wise; very fond of field sports and
athletic exercises. His sentiment--which has been variously criticized, by
some as the perfection of moral pathos, and by others as lackadaisical and
canting--may be said to have sprung rather from his observations of life
and manners than to have welled spontaneously from any source within his
own heart.
Sterne and Goldsmith will be read as long as the English language lasts,
and their representative characters will be quoted as models and standards
everywhere: Mackenzie is fast falling into an oblivion from which he will
only be resuscitated by the historian of English Literature.