IN the summer of 1770 there arrived at the town of Lisle a coach containing three ladies and one man, followed by a travelling chaise with servants and luggage. Of the ladies, one was approaching middle age, handsome and elegant; the other two were her daughters, and both were extremely beautiful and graceful girls, under twenty years of age. The man was a small, middle-aged person, with a face which one would have called plain if it had not been that the protruding of his upper lip and the twinkle in his eyes suggested not plainness, but comedy. The very soul of comedy was in the gravity of his face; but it was that sort which is not apparent to all the world. It was the soul of comedy, not the material part; and most people are disposed to deny the possibility of comedy's existing except in juxtaposition with the grin through the horse-collar. Solemnity in a face, with a twinkle in the eye—that is an expression which comedy may wear without arousing the curiosity—certainly without exciting the laughter—of the multitude. And this was exactly the form that the drama of this man's life assumed; only it was tragedy with a twinkle. Tragedy with a twinkle—that was Oliver Goldsmith.
0203
The vehicles drew up in the courtyard of the hotel in the square, and Dr. Goldsmith, after dismounting and helping the ladies to dismount, gave orders in French to the landlord in respect of the luggage, and made inquiries as to the table d'hôte. Shown to their respective rooms, the members of the party did not meet again for some time, and then it was in the privatesallewhich they had engaged, looking out upon the square. The two girls were seated at a window, and their mother was writing letters at a table at one side.
When Dr. Goldsmith entered we may be pretty sure that he had exchanged his travelling dress for a more imposing toilet, and we may be equally certain that these two girls had something merry to say about the cut or the colour of his garments—we have abundant record of theirbadinagebearing upon his flamboyant liking for colour, and of his retorts in the same spirit. We have seen him strutting to and fro in gay apparel, obtrusively calling attention to the beauty of his waistcoat and speaking in solemn exaggeration of its importance. The girls were well aware of this form of his humour; they appreciated it to the full, and responded to it in their merriment.
Then there came the sound of martial music from the square, and the elder of the girls, opening the window on its hinges, looked out. A regiment of soldiers was turning into the square and would pass the hotel, she said. The two girls stood at one window and Goldsmith at another while the march past took place. It was not surprising that, glancing up and seeing the beautiful pair at the window, the mounted officers at the head of the regiment should feel flattered by the attention, nor was it unlikely that the others, taking thepasfrom their superiors, should look up and exchange expressions in admiration of the beauty of the young ladies. It is recorded that they did so, and that, when the soldiers had marched off, the little man at the other window walked up and down the room in anger “that more attention had been paid to them than to him.”
These are the words of Boswell in concluding his account of the episode, which, by the way, he printed with several other stories in illustration of the overwhelming vanity and extraordinary envy in Goldsmith's nature. As if any human being hearing such a story of the most complete curmudgeon would accept the words as spoken seriously! And yet Boswell printed it in all solemnity, and hoped that every one who read it would believe that Goldsmith, the happy-go-lucky Irishman, was eaten up with envy of the admiration given to the two exquisite girls on whom, by the way, be conferred immortality; for so long as English literature remains the names of the Jessamy Bride and Little Comedy will live. Yes, and so long as discriminating people read the story of Goldsmith's envious outburst they will not fail to see the true picture of what did actually take place in that room in the Lisle hotel—they will see the little man stalking up and down, that solemn face of his more solemn than ever, but the twinkle in his eyes revealing itself all the more brightly on this account, while he shakes his fists at the ladies and affirms that the officers were dolts and idiots to waste their time gazing at them when they had a chance “of seeing me, madam, me—me!” Surely every human being with the smallest amount of imagination will see the little man thumping his waistcoat, while the Miss Hornecks hold up their hands and go into fits of laughter at that whimsical Dr. Goldsmith, whom they had chosen to be their companion on that tour of theirs through France with their mother.
And surely every one must see them in precisely the same attitude, when they read the story in Boswell'sLife of Johnson, and notice what interpretation has been put upon it by the Scotsman—hands uplifted in amazement and faces “o'er-running with laughter” at the thought of how Mr. Boswell has, for the thousandth time, been made a fool of by some one who had picked up the story from themselves and had solemnly narrated it to Boswell. But in those days following the publication of the first edition of theLife, people were going about with uplifted hands, wondering if any man since the world began had ever been so befooled as Boswell.
When the story appeared inJohnson's Lifethe two girls had been married for several years; but one of them at least had not forgotten the incident upon which it was founded; and upon its being repeated in Northcote'sLife of Reynolds, she wrote to the biographer, assuring him that in this, as well as in other stories of the same nature, the expression on Goldsmith's face when he professed to be overcome by envy was such as left no one in doubt that he was jesting. But Croker, in spite of this, had the impudence to sneer at the explanation, and to attribute it to the good-nature of the lady. Mr. Croker seems to have had a special smile of his own for the weaknesses of ladies. This was the way he smiled when he was searching up old registries of their birth in his endeavour to prove that they had made themselves out to be six months younger than they really were. (Quite different, however, must his smile have been when he read Macaulay's Essay on Croker's edition of Boswell'sLife of Johnson). But, unhappily for poor Goldsmith, Mr. Boswell was able to bring forward much stronger evidence of the consuming Vanity, the parent of Envy, with which his “honest Dr. Goldsmith” was afflicted. There was once an exhibition of puppets in Panton Street, and on some member of the distinguished company in which he, curiously enough for such a contemptible lout, constantly found himself, admiring the dexterity with which the wooden figure tossed a halbert, Goldsmith, we are gravely told, appeared annoyed and said: “Pshaw! I could do it as well myself!” Supposing that some one had said to Boswell, “After all, sir, perhaps Dr. Goldsmith could have done it as well himself,” would the man have tried to explain that the question was not whether Goldsmith or the puppet was the more dexterous, but whether it was possible to put any other construction upon Goldsmith's exclamation than that assumed by Mr. Boswell?
Yet another instance is given of Goldsmith's envy, and this time the object of it is not a wooden figure, but Shakespeare himself. He could not bear, Dr. Beattie tells us, that so much admiration should be given to Shakespeare. Hearing this, we feel that we are on quite a different level. There is no jealousy rankling this time in Goldsmith's heart against a mere puppet. It is now a frantic passion of chagrin that Shakespeare should still receive the admiration of a chosen few!
But such vanity as that so strikingly illustrated by this last told story, is, one must confess with feelings of melancholy, not yet wholly extinct among literary men. It would scarcely be believed—unless by Boswell or Beattie—that even in America a man with some reputation as a writer should deliberately ask people to assume that he himself was worthy of a place in a group that included not merely Shakespeare, but also Milton and Homer. “Gentlemen,” said this egregious person at a public dinner, “Gentlemen, think of the great writers who are dead and gone. There was Shakespeare, he is dead and gone; and Milton, alas! is no longer in the land of the living; Homer has been deceased for a considerable time, and I myself, gentlemen, am not feeling very well to-night.”
What a pity it is that Beattie has gone the way of so many other great writers. If he could only have been laid on to Mark Twain we should have the most comic biography ever written.
Goldsmith was, according to the great Boswell and the many lesser Boswells of his day, the most contemptible wretch that ever wrote the finest poem of the century, the finest comedy of the century, the finest romance of the century. He was a silly man, an envious man, an empty-headed man, a stuttering fool, an idiot (of the inspired variety), an awkward lout, a shallow pedant, and a generally ridiculous person; and yet here we find him the chosen companion of two of the most beautiful and charming young ladies in England on their tour through France, and on terms of such intimacy with them and their brother, an officer in the Guards and the son-in-law of a peer, that nicknames are exchanged between them. A singular position for an Irish lout to find himself in!
Even before he is known to fame, and familiar only with famine, he is visited in his garret by Dr. Percy, a member of the great Northumberland family at whose town house he lived. So much for the empty-headed fool who never opened his mouth except to put his foot in it, as a countryman of his said about quite another person. He was a shallow prig, and yet when “the Club” was started not one of the original members questioned his right to a place among the most fastidious of the community, although Garrick—to the shame of Johnson be it spoken—was not admitted for nine years. Boswell—to the shame of Johnson be it spoken—was allowed to crawl in after an exclusion of ten. According to his numerous detractors, this Goldsmith was one of the most objectionable persons possible to imagine, and yet we find him the closest friend of the greatest painter of the day and the greatest actor of the day. He associates with peers on the friendliest terms, and is the idol of their daughters. He is accused, on the one hand, of aiming at being accounted a Macaroni and being extravagant in his dress, and yet he has such a reputation for slovenliness in this respect that it is recorded that Dr. Johnson, who certainly never was accused of harbouring unworthy aspirations to be accounted a beau, made it a point of putting on his best garments—he may even have taken the extreme step of fastening up his garters—before visiting Goldsmith, in order, as he explained, that the latter might have no excuse for his slovenliness. We are also told that Goldsmith made a fool of himself when he got on his feet to make a speech, and yet it is known that he travelled through Europe, winning the hospitality of more than one university by the display of his skill as a disputant. Again, none of his innumerable traits of awkwardness is so widely acknowledged as his conversational, and yet the examples which survive of his impromptu wit are of the most finished type; and (even when the record is made by Boswell), when he set himself out to take opposite sides to Johnson, he certainly spoke better sense than his antagonist, though he was never so loud. It is worth noting that nearly all the hard things which Johnson is reported to have said respecting Goldsmith were spoken almost immediately after one of these disputes. Further, we are assured that Goldsmith's learning was of the shallowest order, and yet when he was appointed Professor of History to the Royal Academy we do not hear that any voice was raised in protest.
What is a simple reader to think when brought face to face with such contradictory accounts of the man and his attainments? Well, possibly the best one can do is to say, as Fanny Burney did, that Goldsmith was an extraordinary man.
Of course, so far as his writings are concerned there is no need for one to say much. They speak for themselves, and readers can form their own opinion on every line and every sentence that has come from his pen. There is no misunderstanding the character ofThe TravellerorThe Deserted VillageorThe Vicar of Wakefield. These are acknowledged by the whole world to be among the most precious legacies of the eighteenth century to posterity. Who reads nowadays, except out of curiosity, such classics asTristram Shandy, Clarissa Harlow, Evelina, or Rasselas?But who has not read, and who does not still read for pleasure,The Vicar of Wakefield?Johnson's laborious poem,The Vanity of Human Wishes, now only exists as an example of the last gasp of the didactic in verse; but we cannot converse without quoting—sometimes unconsciously—fromThe Deserted VillageWhen the actor-manager of a theatre wishes to show how accomplished a company he has at his disposal he producesShe Stoops to Conquer, and he would do so more frequently only he is never quite able to make up his mind whether he himself should play the part of old Hardcastle, Tony Lumpkin, Young Marlow, or Diggory. But what other eighteenth-century comedy of all produced previous to the death of Goldsmith can any manager revive nowadays with any hope of success? Colman of the eighteenth century is as dead as Congreve of the seventeenth; and what about the masterpieces of Cumberland, and Kelly, and Whitehead, and the rest? What about the Rev. Mr. Home'sDouglas, which, according to Dr. Johnson, was equal to Shakespeare at his best? They have all gone to the worms, and these not even bookworms—their very graves are neglected. ButShe Stoops to Conqueris never revived without success—never without a modern audience recognising the fact that its characters are not the puppets of the playwright, but the creations of Nature. It is worthy of mention, too, that the play which first showed the capacity of an actress whose name was ever at the head of the list of actresses of the last generation, was founded onThe Vicar of Wakefield.It was Miss Ellen Terry's appearance inOliviain 1878 that brought about her connection with the ever memorable Lyceum management as an associate of the greatest actor of our day.
These things speak for themselves, and prove incontestably that Goldsmith was head and shoulders above all those writers with whom he was on intimate terms. But the mystery of the contradictory accounts which we have of the man himself and his ways remains as unsolved as ever.
Yes, unless we assume one thing, namely—that the majority of the people about him were incapable of understanding him. Is it going too far to suggest that, as Daniel Defoe was sent to the pillory because his ironic jest inThe Shortest Way with the Dissenterswas taken in earnest, and as good people shuddered at the horrible proposal of Swift that Irish babies should be cooked and eaten, so Goldsmith's peculiarities of humour were too subtle to be in any degree appreciated by most of the people with whom he came in contact in England?
In Ireland there would be no chance of his being misunderstood; for there no form that his humour assumed would be regarded as peculiar. Irony is a figure of speech so largely employed by the inhabitants in some parts that people who have lived there for any length of time have heard whole conversations carried on by two or three men without the slightest divergence from this tortuous form of expression into the straight path of commonplace English. And all this time there was no expression but one of complete gravity on the faces of the speakers; a stranger had no clue whatsoever to the game of words that was being played before him.
Another fully recognised form of humour which prevails in Ireland is even more difficult for a stranger to follow; its basis consists in mystifying another person, not for the sake of getting a laugh from a third who has been let into the secret, but simply for the satisfaction of the mystifier himself. The forms that such a scheme of humour may assume are various. One of the most common is an affectation of extraordinary stupidity. It is usually provoked by the deliverance of a platitude by a stranger. The humourist pretends that he never heard such a statement before, and asks to have it repeated. When this is done, there is usually a pause in which the profoundest thought is suggested; then the clouds are seen to clear away, and the perplexity on the man's face gives way to intelligence; he has grasped the meaning of the phrase at last, and he announces his victory with sparkling eyes, and forthwith puts quite a wrong construction upon the simplest words. His chuckling is brought to a sudden stop by the amazed protest of the victim against the suggested solution of the obvious. Thus, with consummate art, the man is led on to explain at length, with ridiculous emphasis, the exact meaning of his platitude; but it is all to no purpose. The humourist shakes his head; he pretends that the cleverness of the other is too much for him to grasp all in a moment; it's a fine thing to have learning, to be sure, but these things may be best not meddled with by ignorant creatures like himself; and so he goes off murmuring his admiration for the fine display of wisdom that comes so easy-like from the man whom he has been fooling.
This form of humour is indulged in by some Irishmen simply for the satisfaction it gives them to indulge in it. They never hurry off to acquaint a neighbour with what they have done, and they are quite pleased with the thought that the person on whom they have been imposing will tell the whole story of their extraordinary obtuseness to some one else; it never strikes them that that some one else may fail to see through the trick, and actually be convinced of the existence of their obtuseness. But if such a possibility did occur to them, they would be all the better pleased: they would feel that they had fooled two instead of one.
But, of course, the most widely recognised form of Irish humour is that known as the “bull.” This is the delivery of a paradox so obvious as to be detected—after a brief consideration—by an Englishman or even—after an additional space for thought—by a Scotsman. But where the fun comes in is (in the Irishman's eyes) when the others assume that the humour of the bull is involuntary; and this is just what the Englishman has been doing, and what the Irishman has been encouraging him to do, for centuries. The Englishman is so busy trying to make it appear that he is cleverer than he really is, he cannot see the humour of any man trying to make out that he is more stupid than he really is. Let no one fancy for a moment that the humour of an Irish bull is involuntary. It is a form of expression that may be due to a peculiar twist in the Irishman's mind—indeed, every form of humour may be said to be due to a peculiar twist of the mind—but it is as much a figure of speech as irony or satire. “Blarney” and “palaver” are other forms of speech in which the Irish of some generations ago indulged with great freedom, and both are essentially Irish and essentially humorous, though occasionally borrowed and clumsily worn on the other side of the Channel, just as the bernous of the Moor is worn by an English missionary when lecturing in the village schoolroom (with a magic-lantern) on The Progress of Christianity in Morocco.
It would be interesting to make a scientific inquiry into the origin and the maintenance of all these forms of expression among the Irish; but it is unnecessary to do so in this place. It is enough if we remind English readers of the existence of such forms even in the present day, when there is so little need for their display. It can without difficulty be understood by any one, however superficially acquainted with the history of Ireland for the past thousand years, that “blarney” and “palaver” were as necessary to the existence of the natives of the island as suspicion and vigilance were to the existence of the invaders. But it is not so apparent why Irishmen should be given to rush into the extremes of bragging on the one hand, and self-depreciation on the other. Bragging is, however, as much an endowment of Nature for the protection of a species or a race as is imitation or mimicry. The Irishman who was able by the exercise of this gift to intimidate the invaders, escaped a violent death and transmitted his art to his children. The practice of the art of self-depreciation was quite as necessary for the existence of the Irish race up to the time of the passing of the first Land Act. For several generations an Irishman was not allowed to own a horse of greater value than five pounds; and every Irish agriculturist who improved the miserable cabin which he was supposed to share with his pigs and his fowl, might rest certain that his rent would be raised out of all proportion to his improvements. In these circumstances it can easily be understood that it was accounted a successful joke for a man who was doing tolerably well to put on a poor face when in the presence of an inquiry agent of the absent landlord—to run down all his own efforts and to depreciate generally his holding, and thus to save himself from the despicable treatment which was meted out to the unfortunate people by the conquerors of their country.
It is not necessary to do more than make these suggestions to a scientific investigator who may be disposed to devote some time to the question of the origin of certain forms of Irish humour; it is enough for us, in considering the mystery of that typical Irishman, Oliver Goldsmith, to know that such forms of humour as we have specified have an actual existence. Such knowledge is a powerful illuminant to a reader of Boswell's and Beattie's stories of the stupidity of Goldsmith. A fine flood of light is thrown upon the apparent mystery of the inspiration of this idiot—of this man “who wrote like an angel and talked like poor poll.”
Goldsmith was just too successful in maintaining that gravity which is the very essence of those forms of humour in which he was constantly indulging for his own satisfaction; the mask of gravity was such a good fit that the short-sighted people who were around him never penetrated it. He was making fools of the people about him, never giving a thought to the possibility that they would transmit to posterity the impression which his attitude conveyed to them, which was that he was a shallow fool.
Of course, it would be as absurd to contend that Goldsmith never made a fool of himself as it would be to assume that Johnson never made a fool of himself, or that Boswell ever failed to do so. The occasions upon which he made himself ridiculous must have been numerous, but out of the many incidents which Boswell and Beattie and Cooke and the others bring forward as proofs of his stupidity there are few that will not bear to be interpreted as instances of his practice of a form of humour well known in Ireland. If his affectation of chagrin at the admiration given to the Panton Street puppets, followed by the boast, “I could do it as well myself,” was not humorous, then indeed there is nothing humorous under the sun. If his object of setting the room roaring with laughter was not achieved the night when at the club he protested that the oratory of Burke was nothing—that all oratory, as a matter of fact, was only a knack—and forthwith stood upon a chair and began to stutter, all that can be said is that the famous club at Gerrard Street was more stolid than could be believed. If his strutting about the room where he and his friends were awaiting a late-comer to dinner, entreating Johnson and the rest to pay particular attention to the cut of his new peach-bloom coat, and declaring that Filby, his tailor, had told him that when any one asked him who had made the garment he was not to forget Filby's address, did not help materially to enliven the tedium of that annoying wait, all that can be said is that Thrale, as well as Boswell, must have been of the party.
If a novelist, anxious to depict a typical humorous Irishman, were to show his hero acting as Boswell says Goldsmith acted, would not every reader acknowledge that he was true to the character of a comical Irishman? If a playwriter were to put the scene on the stage, would any one in the audience fail to see that the Goldsmith of the piece was fooling? Every one in the club—Boswell best of all—was aware of the fact that Goldsmith had the keenest admiration for Burke, and that he would be the last man in the world to decry his powers. As for the peach-bloom coat, it had been the butt of much jesting on the part of his friends; the elder of the Miss Hornecks had written him a letter of pretty “chaff” about it, all of which he took in good part. He may have bought the coat originally because he liked the tint of the velvet; but assuredly when he found that it could be made the subject of a jest he did not hesitate to jest upon it himself. How many times have we not seen in Ireland a man behave in exactly the same way under similar conditions—a boisterous young huntsman who had put on pink for the first time, and was strutting with much pride before an admiring group of servants, every one of whom had some enthusiastic remark to make about the fit of the coat, until at last the youth, pointing out the perfection of the gilt buttons, murmured: “Oh, but isn't this a great day for Ireland!”
What a pity it was that Mr. Boswell had not been present at such a scene! Can we not hear his comments upon the character of the young man who had actually been so carried away by his vanity that he was heard to express the opinion that the fortunes of his country would be materially affected by the fact of the buttons of his new coat being gilt? (It was this same Mr. Boswell, the critic of Goldsmith's all too attractive costume, who, when going to see Pitt for the first time, put on Corsican native dress, pretending that he did so in order to interest Pitt in General Paoli.)
In reading these accounts of Goldsmith's ways and the remarks of his associates it must be noticed that some of these gentlemen had now and again an uneasy impression that there was more in the poet's stupidity than met the eye. Sir Joshua Reynolds was his closest friend, and it was the business of the painter to endeavour to get below the surface of his sitters. The general idea that prevails in the world is that he was rather successful in his attempts to reproduce, not merely their features, but their characters as well; and Sir Joshua saw enough beneath the rude exterior of the man to cause him to feel toward Goldsmith as he felt for none of his other friends. When the news of his death was brought to the painter, he laid down his brushes and spent the day in seclusion. When it is remembered that he spent every day of the week, not even excepting Sunday, in his studio, the depth of his grief for the loss of his friend will be understood. Upon more than one occasion Reynolds asserted that Goldsmith was diverting himself by trying to make himself out to be more stupid than he really was. Malone, whose judgment was rarely at fault, whether it was exercised in the detection of fraud or in the discovery of genius, was in perfect agreement with Reynolds on this point, and was always ready to affirm that Boswell was unjust in his remarks upon Goldsmith and the conclusions to which he came in respect of his character. It is not necessary for one to have an especially vivid imagination to enable one to see what was the expression on Malone's face when he came upon the patronising passage in theLife of Johnsonin which Boswell stated that for his part he was always glad to hear “honest Dr. Goldsmith” converse. “Puppy!” cried Johnson upon one occasion when a certain commentator had patronised a text out of all recognition. What would he have said had he heard Goldsmith patronised by Boswell?
So far as Goldsmith's actual vanity is concerned, all that can be said at this time is that had it existed in the offensive form which it assumes in some of Boswell's stories, Goldsmith would never have won the friendship of those men and women who were his friends before he had made a reputation for himself by the publication ofThe 'Traveller. If he had had an extravagant opinion of his own capacity as a poet, he would certainly never have suffered Johnson to make an attempt to improve upon one of his poems; but Goldsmith not only allowed him to do so, but actually included the lines written by Johnson when he published the poem. Had he been eaten up by vanity, he would not have gone wandering down the Mall in St. James's Park while his comedy was being played for the first time before a delighted house. The really vain man was the author of The Vanity of Human Wishes, who bought the showiest set of garments he could find and sat in all their glory in the front row of the boxes on the night when Garrick produced his tragedy ofIrene—Garrick whom he kept out of the Club for nine years simply because the actor had expressed a wish to become one of the original members. The really vain man was the one who made his stock story his account of his conversation with the King in the Royal Library. Every one sees this now, and every one saw it, except Boswell, when theLifewas flung in the face of a convulsed public, for the public of the year 1791 were as little aware of the real value of the book as the author was of the true character of his hero and his hero's friend Goldsmith.
After all, there would be no better way of arriving at a just conclusion on the subject of Goldsmith's stupidity than by submitting the whole of the case to an ordinary man accustomed to the many peculiarities of Irishmen, especially in the exercise of their doubtful gift of humour. “Here is a man,” we must say, “who became the most intimate friend of people of title and the dearest friend of many men of brains. When the most exclusive Club of the day was started his place as a member was not disputed, even by the man who invented the word 'clubbable,' and knew what it meant into the bargain; when the Royal Academy of Arts was started he was invited to become one of its professors. Some of the wittiest things recorded by the most diligent recorder of witty things that the world has ever known, were uttered by him. Upon one occasion when walking among the busts of the poets in Westminster Abbey with a friend, the latter pointing around said:
“'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.'
“Leaving the Abbey and walking down the Strand to Temple Bar they saw the heads of the men who had been captured and decapitated for taking part in the Rebellion of the year 1745, bleaching in the winds in accordance with the terms of the sentence for high treason.
“'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis,' murmured the man of whom we speak. Upon another occasion this same friend of his, who had a unique reputation for speaking in the most ponderous language, even when dealing with the simplest matters, asserted that the writing of the dialogue in some recently published fables where fish were represented as conversing, was very simple. 'Not so simple at all,' said the other, 'for were you to write them, you would make every minnow talk like a whale.'
“In the course of a few years, in addition to compiling histories, which remained standard educational works for more than a century, and several other books, he wrote a novel which received the highest praise from the greatest intellects in Europe, and which is still read with delight by thousands of people of all nationalities; a poem of which almost every line is quoted daily in conversation—a poem which contains metaphors that have been repeated for generations in the Senate, in the Court of Law, and in the Church; and a play which has been pronounced the truest comedy in the English language. He died at an early age, and a memorial of his genius was given a place in Westminster Abbey. The inscription was written by the most distinguished man of letters in England, and although highly eulogistic, was considered by the greatest painter in the world and the greatest orator in the world to fall short of doing justice to the subject.
“But, on the other hand, the man of whom we speak was said by a Scotchman, who himself was occasionally referred to as a cur and sometimes as an ape, and more than once as a coxcomb, to have been roused to a frenzy of envy, because some officers, passing through a square in a French town, looked admiringly at two lovely girls who were at a window, ignoring him at another window; and again because his friends spoke with favour of the dexterity of a wooden figure dressed as a soldier, and yet again (on another authority) because one of his friends read a passage from Shakespeare, and affirmed that it was magnificent. Now, would you say,” we should ask the authority to whom we are supposed to be stating a case—“would you say that this man was in earnest when, in the first of the instances quoted, he walked up and down the room in the French hotel asserting 'that although the young ladies, of whom he was extremely fond, might have their admirers, there were places where he, too, was given admiration'? Would you say that he showed ill-temper or wit when, in the second instance, he declared with warmth that he could toss a halbert quite as well as any wooden figure? Would you say that——”
But we should not get any further than this in stating our case to a man acquainted with the Irish and their humour: he would think that we were taking a leaf out of the book of Irish humour, and endeavouring to fool him by asking him to pronounce a grave opinion upon the obvious; he would not stay to give us a chance of asking him whether he thought that the temptation of making “Noll” rhyme with “Poll,” was not too great to be resisted by the greatest farceur of his time, in the presence of a humorous colleague called Oliver; and whether an impecunious but witty Irishman begged his greatest friend not to give him the nickname of Goldy, because his dignity was hurt thereby, or simply because it was tantalising for one to be called “Goldy,” whose connection with gold was usually so transitory.
If people will only read the stories told of poor Goldsmith's vanity, and envy, and coxcombry, with a handbook of Irish humour beside them, the conclusion to which they will come must, we think, be that Goldsmith was an Irishman, and that, on the whole, he made very good fun of Boswell, who was a Scotsman, but that in the long run Boswell got very much the better of him. Scotsmen usually laugh last.
HE occupied one room in the farmhouse—the guest-chamber it had probably been called when the farm was young. It was a pretty spacious apartment up one pair of stairs and to the right of the landing, and from its window there was a pleasing prospect of a paddock with wheat-fields beyond; there was a drop in the landscape in the direction of Hendon, and here was a little wood. The farmer's name was Selby, a married man with a son of sixteen, and younger children, and the farmhouse was the nearest building to the sixth milestone on the Edgware Road in the year 1771.
He was invariably alluded to as “The Gentleman,” and the name did very well for him, situated as he was in the country; in the town and among his acquaintances it would serve badly as a means of identification. He was never referred to as “The Gentleman” of his circle. In his room in the farmhouse there was his bed and table—a large table littered with books; it took two chaises to carry his books hither from his rooms in the Temple. Here he sat and wrote the greater part of the day, and when he was very busy he would scarcely be able to touch the meals which were sent up to him from the kitchen. But he was by no means that dignified type of the man of letters who would shrink from fellowship with the farmer or his family. He would frequently come down his stairs into the kitchen and stand with his back to the fire, conversing with the housewife, and offering her his sympathy when she had made him aware of the fact that the privilege of being the wife of a substantial farmer, though undoubtedly fully recognised by the world, carried many troubles in its train, not only in connection with the vicissitudes of churning, but in regard to the feeding of the calves, which no man could attend to properly, and the making of the damson and cowslip wine. He told her that the best maker of cowslip wine whom he had ever met was a Mrs. Primrose; her husband had at one time occupied the Vicarage of Wakefield—he wondered if Mrs. Selby had ever heard of her. Mrs. Selby's knowledge did not go so far, but she thought that Mrs. Primrose's recipe must be a good one indeed if it brought forth better results than her own; and the gentleman said that although he had never tasted Mrs. Selby's he would still have no hesitation in backing it for flavour, body, headiness, and all other qualities associated with the distillation of the cowslip, against the Primrose brand.
And then he would stare at the gammon in the rafter and mutter some words, burst into a roar of laughter, and stumble upstairs to his writing, leaving the good woman to thank Heaven that she was the wife of a substantial farmer and not of an unsubstantial gentleman of letters, who could not carry on a simple conversation without having some queer thought fly across his brain for all the world like one of the swallows on the water at Hendon, only maybe a deal harder to catch. She knew that the gentleman had hurried to his paper and ink to complete the capture of that fleet-flitting thought which had come to him when he had cast his eyes toward the gammon, though how an idea worth putting on paper—after a few muttered words and a laugh—could lurk about a common piece of hog's-flesh was a mystery to her.
And then upon occasions the gentleman would take a walk abroad; the farmer's son had more than once come upon him strolling about the fields with his hands in his pockets and his head bent toward the ground, still muttering fitfully and occasionally giving a laugh that made the grey pad in the paddock look up slowly, still munching the grass. Now and again he paid a visit to his friend Mr. Hugh Boyd at the village of Kenton, and once he returned late at night from such a visit, without his shoes. He had left them in a quagmire, he said, and it was only with a struggle that he saved himself from being engulfed as well. That was the story of his shoes which young Selby remembered when he was no longer young. And there was another story which he remembered, but it related to his slippers. The fact was that the gentleman had acquired the bad habit of reading in bed, and the table on which his candlestick stood being several feet away from his pillow, he saved himself the trouble of rising to extinguish it by flinging a slipper at it. In the morning the overturned candle was usually found side by side on the floor with an unaccountably greasy slipper. This method of discharging an important domestic duty differed considerably from Johnson's way of compassing the same end. Johnson, being extremely short-sighted, was compelled to hold the candle close to the book when reading in bed, so that he had no need to use his slipper as an extinguisher. No, but he found his pillow very handy for this purpose. When he had finished his reading he threw away the book and went asleep with his candle under his pillow.
The gentleman at the farm went about a good deal in his slippers, and with his shirt loose at the collar—the latter must have been but one of his very customary negligences, or Sir Joshua Reynolds would not have painted him thus. Doubtless the painter had for long recognised the interpretative value of this loosened collar above that of the velvet and silk raiment in which the man sometimes appeared before the wondering eyes of his friends.
But if the painter had never had an opportunity of studying the picturesqueness of his negligence, he had more than one chance of doing so within the farmhouse.
Young Selby recollected that upon at least one occasion Sir Joshua, his friend Sir William Chambers, and Dr. Johnson had paid a visit to the gentleman who lodged at the farm. He remembered that for that reception of so distinguished a company the farmhouse parlour had been opened and tea provided. There must have been a good deal of pleasant talk between the gentleman and his friends at this time, and probably young Selby heard an astonishingly loud laugh coming from the enormous visitor with the brown coat and the worsted stockings, as the gentleman endeavoured to tell his guests something of the strange scenes which he was introducing in the comedy he was writing in that room upstairs. It was then a comedy without a name, but young Selby heard that it was produced the following year in London and that it was calledShe Stoops to Conquer.
This was the second year that the gentleman had spent at the farm. The previous summer he had been engaged on another work which was certainly as comical as the comedy. It was calledAnimated Nature, and it comprised some of the most charmingly narrated errors in Natural History ever offered to the public, and the public have always been delighted to read pages of fiction if it is only called “Natural History.” This is one of the best-established facts in the history of the race. After all,Animated Naturewas true to half its title: every page was animated.
It was while he was so engaged, with one eye on Buffon and another on his MS., that he found Farmer Selby very useful to him. Farmer Selby knew a great deal about animals—the treatment of horses under various conditions, and the way to make pigs pay; he had probably his theories respecting the profit to be derived from keeping sheep, and how to feed oxen that are kept for the plough. All such knowledge he must have placed at the disposal of the author, though the farmer was possibly too careless an observer of the simple incidents of the fields to be able to verify Buffon's statement, reproduced in Animated Nature, to the effect that cows shed their horns every two years; he was probably also too deficient in the spirit in which a poet sets about the work of compilation to be able to assent to the belief that a great future was in store for the zebra when it should become tame and perform the ordinary duties of a horse. But if the author was somewhat discouraged in his speculations now and again by Farmer Selby, he did not allow his fancy as a naturalist to be wholly repressed. He had heard a story of an ostrich being ridden horsewise in some regions, and of long journeys being accomplished in this way in incredibly short spaces of time, and forthwith his imagination enabled him to see the day when this bird would become as amenable to discipline as the barn-door fowl, though discharging the tasks of a horse, carrying its rider across England with the speed of a racer!
It was while he was engaged on this pleasant work of fancy and imagination that Mr. Boswell paid him a visit, bringing with him as a witness Mr. Mickle, the translator of the Lusiad. “The Gentleman” had gone away for the day, Mrs. Selby explained; but she did not know Mr. Boswell. She could not prevent him from satisfying his curiosity in respect of Dr. Goldsmith. He went upstairs to his room, and he was fully satisfied. He found the walls all scrawled over with outline drawings of quite a number of animals. Having thus satisfied himself that the author ofAnimated Naturewas working in a thoroughly conscientious manner he came away. He records the incident himself, but he does not say whether or not he was able to recognise any of the animals from their pictures.
But now it was a professed and not an unconscious comedy that occupied Dr. Goldsmith. Whatever disappointment he may have felt at the indifferent success of the first performance ofThe Good-Natured Man—and he undoubtedly felt some—had been amply redeemed by the money which accrued to him from the “author's rights” and the sale of the play; and he had only awaited a little encouragement from the managers to enable him to begin another comedy. But the managers were not encouraging, and he was found by his friends one day to be full of a scheme for the building of a new theatre for the production of new plays, in order that the existing managers might not be able to carry on their tyranny any longer. Such a scheme has been revived every decade since Goldsmith's time, but never with the least success. Johnson, whose sound sense was rarely at fault, laughed at the poet's project for bringing down the mighty from their seats, upon which Goldsmith cried: “Ay, sir, this matter may be nothing to you who can now shelter yourself behind the corner of your pension,” and he doubtless went on to describe the condition of the victims of the tyranny of which he complained; but it is questionable if his doing so effected more than to turn Johnson's laughter into another and a wider channel.
But Goldsmith spoke feelingly. He was certainly one of the ablest writers of the day, but no pension was ever offered to him, though on every hand bounties were freely bestowed on the most indifferent and least deserving of authors—men whose names were forgotten before the end of the century, and during the lifetime of the men themselves remembered only by the pay clerk to the almoner.
Of course, the scheme for bringing the managers to their senses never reached a point of serious consideration; and forthwith Goldsmith began to illustrate, for the benefit of posterity, the depths to which the stupidity of the manager of a play-house can occasionally fall. The public have always had abundant proofs of the managers' stupidity afforded them in the form of the plays which they produce; but the history of the production of the most brilliant comedy of the eighteenth century is practically unique; for it is the history of the stupidity of a manager doing his best to bring about the failure of a play which he was producing at his own theatre. He had predicted the failure of the piece, and it must strike most people that the manager of a theatre who produces for a failure will be as successful in compassing his end as a jockey who rides for a fall. Colman believed that he was in the fortunate position of those prophets who had the realisation of their predictions in their own hands. He was mistaken in this particular case. Although he was justified on general principles in assuming his possession of this power, yet he had made no allowance for the freaks of genius. He was frustrated in his amiable designs by this incalculable force—this power which he had treated as aquantité négligeable. A man who has been accustomed all his life to count only on simple ability in the people about him, is, on suddenly being brought face to face with genius, like an astronomer who makes out his tables of a new object on the assumption that it is a fixed star, when all the time it is a comet, upsetting by its erratic course all his calculations, and demanding to be reckoned with from a standpoint that applies to itself alone.
The stars of Colman's theatrical firmament were such as might safely be counted on; but Goldsmith's genius was not of this order. The manager's stupidity lay in his blunt refusal to recognise a work of genius when it was brought to him by a man of genius.
It has been said that the central idea of the plot ofShe Stoops to Conquerwas suggested by an incident that came under Goldsmith's notice before he left Ireland. However this may be, it cannot be denied that the playing of the practical joke of Tony Lumpkin upon the two travellers is “very Irish.” It would take a respectable place in the list of practical jokes of the eighteenth century played in Ireland. In that island a collector of incidents for a comedy during the past two centuries would require to travel with a fat notebook—so would the collector of incidents for a tragedy. Goldsmith's task may not have been to invent the central idea, but to accomplish the much more difficult duty of making that incident seem plausible, surrounding it with convincing scenery and working it out by the aid of the only characters by which it could be worked out with a semblance of being natural. This was a task which genius only could fulfil. The room whose walls bore ample testimony to its occupant's sense of the comedy of a writer's life, witnessed the supreme achievement in the “animated nature” ofShe Stoops to Conquer. It contains the two chief essentials to a true comedy—animation and nature.
It is certain that the play was constructed and written by Goldsmith without an adviser. He was possibly shrewd enough to know that if he were to take counsel with any of his friends—Garrick, Johnson, Reynolds, or Colman—he would not be able to write the play which he had a mind to write. The artificial comedy had a vogue that year, and though it may have been laughed at in private by people of judgment, yet few of those within the literary circle of which Johnson was the acknowledged centre, would have had the courage to advise a poet writing a piece in hopes of making some money, to start upon a plot as farcical as Nature herself. At that period of elegance in art everything that was natural was pronounced vulgar. Shakespeare himself had to be made artificial before he could be played by Garrick. Goldsmith must have known that his play would be called vulgar, and that its chances of being accepted and produced by either of the managers in London would be doubtful; but, all the same, he wrote the piece in accordance with his own personal views, and many a time during the next two years he must have felt that he was a fool for doing so.
However this may be, the play was finished some time in the summer of 1771; and on September 7th the author was back at his rooms in the Temple and writing to his friend Bennet Langton, whom he had promised to visit at his place in Lincolnshire. “I have been almost wholly in the country at a farmer's house, quite alone, trying to write a comedy. It is now finished, but when or how it will be acted, or whether it will be acted at all, are questions I cannot resolve,” he told Langton.