Little Primrose dames of the English classic, the wife and daughters of
the Vicar of Wakefield have no claim whatever to this name of lady. It
is given to them in this page because Goldsmith himself gave it to them
in the yet undepreciated state of the word, and for the better reason
that he obviously intended them to be the equals of the men to whom he
marries them, those men being, with all their faults, gentlemen.
Goldsmith, in a word, meant them to be ladies, of country breeding, but
certainly fit for membership of that large class of various fortune
within which the name makes a sufficient equality.
He, their author, thought them sufficient. Having amused himself
ingeniously throughout the story with their nameless vulgarities, he
finally hurries them into so much sentiment as may excuse the convention
of heroes in love. He plays with their coarseness like a perfectly
pleased and clever showman, and then piously and happily shuts up his
couples--the gentle Dr. Primrose with his abominable Deborah; the
excellent Mr. Burchell with the paltry Sophia; Olivia--but no, Olivia is
not so certainly happy ever after; she has a captured husband ready for
her in a state of ignominy, but she has also a forgotten farmer somewhere
in the background--the unhappy man whom, with her father's permission,
this sorry heroine had promised to marry in order that his wooing might
pluck forward the lagging suit of the squire.
Olivia, then, plays her common trick upon the harmless Williams, her
father conniving, with a provision that he urges with some demonstration
of virtue: she shall consent to make the farmer happy if the proposal of
the squire be not after all forthcoming. But it is so evident her author
knew no better, that this matter may pass. It involves a point of
honour, of which no one--neither the maker of the book nor anyone he
made--is aware. What is better worth considering is the fact that
Goldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed vulgarity of the ladies
of the Idyll, and cheerfully took it for granted as the thing to be
expected from the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughters
of a scholar. The education of women had sunk into a degradation never
reached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men.
It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose "could read any English
book without much spelling" if her husband and son were as definitely
limited to journeyman's field-labour as she was to the pickling and the
gooseberry wine. Any of those industries is a better and more liberal
business than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing.
Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately of
that century or of an unlettered state. What is really unhandsome is the
new, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen.
That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a village
worldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent,
foul-mouthed, pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almost
innocently natural, in Goldsmith's story; the squalid Mrs. Primrose is
all this. He is still able, through his Vicar, in the most charmingly
humorous passage in the book, to praise her for her "prudence, economy,
and obedience." Her other, more disgusting, characteristics give her
husband an occasion for rebuking her as "Woman!" This is done, for
example, when, despite her obedience, she refuses to receive that unlucky
schemer, her own daughter, returned in ruins, without insulting her by
the sallies of a kitchen sarcasm.
She plots with her daughters the most disastrous fortune hunt. She has
given them a teaching so effectual that the Vicar has no fear lest the
paltry Sophia should lose her heart to the good, the sensible Burchell,
who had saved her life; for he has no fortune. Mrs. Primrose begins
grotesquely, with her tedious histories of the dishes at dinner, and she
ends upon the last page, anxious, amid the general happiness, in regard
to securing the head of the table. Upon these feminine humours the
author sheds his Vicar's indulgent smile. What a smile for a
self-respecting husband to be pricked to smile! A householder would
wince, one would think, at having opportunity to bestow its tolerance
upon his cook.
Between these two housewifely appearances, Mrs. Primrose potters through
the book; plots--always squalidly; talks the worst kinds of folly; takes
the lead, with a loud laugh, in insulting a former friend; crushes her
repentant daughter with reproaches that show envy rather than
indignation, and kisses that daughter with congratulation upon hearing
that she had, unconsciously and unintentionally, contracted a valid
marriage (with a rogue); spoils and makes common and unclean everything
she touches; has but two really gentle and tender moments all through the
story; and sets, once for all, the example in literature of the woman we
find thenceforth, in Thackeray, in Douglas Jerrold, in Dickens, and _un
peu partout_.
Hardly less unspiritual, in spite of their conventional romance of youth
and beauty, are the daughters of the squalid one. The author, in making
them simple, has not abstained from making them cunning. Their vanities
are well enough, but these women are not only vain, they are so envious
as to refuse admiration to a sister-in-law--one who is their rival in no
way except in so much as she is a contemporary beauty. "Miss Arabella
Wilmot," says the pious father and vicar, "was allowed by all (except my
two daughters) to be completely pretty."
They have been left by their father in such brutal ignorance as to be
instantly deceived into laughing at bad manners in error for humour. They
have no pretty or sensitive instincts. "The jests of the rich," says the
Vicar, referring to his own young daughters as audience, "are ever
successful." Olivia, when the squire played off a dullish joke, "mistook
it for humour. She thought him, therefore, a very fine gentleman." The
powders and patches for the country church, the ride thither on
Blackberry, in so strange a procession, the face-wash, the dreams and
omens, are all good gentle comedy; we are completely convinced of the
tedium of Mrs. Primrose's dreams, which she told every morning. But
there are other points of comedy that ought not to precede an author's
appeal to the kind of sentiment about to be touched by the tragic scenes
of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.
In odd sidling ways Goldsmith bethinks himself to give his principal
heroine a shadow of the virtues he has not bestowed upon her. When the
unhappy Williams, above-mentioned, has been used in vain by Olivia, and
the squire has not declared himself, and she is on the point of keeping
her word to Williams by marrying him, the Vicar creates a situation out
of it all that takes the reader roundly by surprise: "I frequently
applauded her resolution in preferring happiness to ostentation." The
good Goldsmith! Here is Olivia perfectly frank with her father as to her
exceedingly sincere preference for ostentation, and as to her stratagem
to try to obtain it at the expense of honour and of neighbour Williams;
her mind is as well known to her father as her father's mind is known to
Oliver Goldsmith, and as Oliver Goldsmith's, Dr. Primrose's, and Olivia's
minds are known to the reader. And in spite of all, your Goldsmith and
your Vicar turn you this phrase to your very face. You hardly know which
way to look; it is so disconcerting.
Seeing that Olivia (with her chance-recovered virtue) and Sophia may both
be expected to grow into the kind of matronhood represented by their
mother, it needs all the conditions of fiction to surround the close of
their love-affairs with the least semblance of dignity. Nor, in fact,
can it be said that the final winning of Sophia is an incident that errs
by too much dignity. The scene is that in which Burchell, revealed as
Sir William Thornhill, feigns to offer her in marriage to the
good-natured rogue, Jenkinson, fellow prisoner with her father, in order
that, on her indignant and distressed refusal, he may surprise her
agreeably by crying, "What? Not have him? If that be the case, I think
I must have you myself." Even for an avowedly eccentric master of whims,
this is playing with forbidden ironies. True, he catches her to his
breast with ardour, and calls her "sensible." "Such sense and such
heavenly beauty," finally exclaims the happy man. Let us make him a
present of the heavenly beauty. It is the only thing not disproved, not
dispraised, not disgraced, by a candid study of the Ladies of the Idyll.