Oliver Goldsmith Part 1

Oliver Goldsmith.

by E. S. Lang Buckland.

PREFACE

It is only right to acknowledge my indebtedness in the compilation of this volume to John Forster, to whom as one of the most courageous, industrious, and sympathetic of the writers of biography, all students of Goldsmith must be profoundly grateful. To several other writers I must also express my thanks, and to save the time of my kind readers and to preserve a proper sense of obligation, it would perhaps be best to admit at once that if this little book has any merits, they are due to others, while its errors are all my own.

E. S. L. B.

CHAPTER I

"THE BEST BELOVED OF ENGLISH WRITERS"

The Goldsmith family sprang originally from Crayford, a nestling village in Kent. This southern county, in all its loveliness, can thus add this high honour to its other though not greater glories. "To be the best beloved of English writers," said Thackeray, "what a t.i.tle that is for a man!" This he gave to Goldsmith. It is a t.i.tle that none will dispute. Here is a love that will never pa.s.s away from our hearts. Of Oliver Goldsmith, as poet and novelist, essay-writer, wit and playwright, it may be said that his distinction and celebrity are essentially English. Erin, sweet sister island, that land of loving hearts, gave this child of sun and shade, his birthplace, his home and many dear delightful days, never to be forgotten. Across the separating years, to the very end and through all, the grateful heart of the poet looked back very fondly upon the gentle and pathetic land of his nativity. On November 10, 1728, Oliver Goldsmith first saw the light of that world which, to the last, he loved, and greeted that suffering heart and seeking aspiration of humanity, that above and beyond almost all other men he could, and did, unfailingly compa.s.sionate. It is needless to trace and recall, the ancestral traditions of the Goldsmith family. Of its early history in England and later settlement in Ireland, it will suffice that its annals are as honourable as they are obscure. It had its men of light and learning, but their power attained neither fame nor rank, and their virtues were rather domestic than distinguished.

The family, which flowers in the delightful novelist and playwright, was ever famed for goodness of heart and the possession of the very smallest possible sum total of worldly prudence. Goldsmith was named Oliver, after Oliver Jones, his grandfather. Noll held that Miss Ann Jones, his mother, was descended from a Huntingdon stock, and that the name Oliver came from no ancestor less celebrated than the Great Protector. Whilst this may be felicitously fanciful, and quite in character with dear Noll, who, doting upon every form of finery, whether it came from ill.u.s.trious ancestry or coloured clothes, certainly had a face not unlike in contour and feature, the rugged countenance of Cromwell.

Goldsmith was born in the remote village of Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, Ireland. This district has been called the very midmost solitude. Oliver's father was the Vicar of the parish. Three daughters and one son preceded the appearance of little Noll in the parsonage at Pallasmore. He was followed by three more brothers, making in all a happy family of eight, of whom two died in childhood.

In 1730 the Rev. Charles Goldsmith was preferred from Pallas to the living of Kilkenny West. The parsonage connected with this better benefice was situated at Lissoy, the Immortal Village. Here Oliver's childhood was pa.s.sed. Unlike Pallasmore, this was a picturesque place in the centre of a fair and goodly land. No poem opens more sweetly than that which heralds its message:

"Sweet Auburn, loveliest village."

The Vicar's meagre income as a country pastor was increased by farming, and vastly diminished by his open-hearted, swift responsiveness to every sudden or permanent appeal to his purse, the family wardrobe, or the larder. In this excellent and honoured man, whose very piety was as sublime as it was confused, rambling, and paradoxical, we have the quaint original of Dr. Primrose, one of the most lovable characters that has ever lived to charm the page of lasting literature.

In the family life at Lissoy one little child strikes us all with deepest interest and love, and yet he was an oddity to those who knew him, not as we do now, but as he was--a dull boy, and quite a "blockhead in book-learning."

The master at the village school had been a soldier under the Duke of Marlborough ere he returned to what had been his earlier vocation, that of a pedagogue. He was a rough diamond, yet most revered, with great kindness in his heart. His love of poetry inspired his pupils as much as his stories of campaigns. He had an excellent literary taste.

If Goldsmith even when a boy valued this old friend, Paddy Byrne not less saw the goodness, the hidden power, and the brightness of the child. Noll was soon taken away from the village school. Just at the moment when the heart of the master had greeted the hope of his little scholar, Oliver caught confluent smallpox, with the pathetic result that a face plain to begin with, grew a whimsical and winsome ugliness all its own. Goldsmith has given us more than one friend, and not the least of these old Paddy Byrne:

"Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way, With blossom'd furze unprofitably gay, There, in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule, The village master taught his little school.

A man severe he was, and stern to view; I knew him well, and every truant knew."

Then we are told:

"Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee At all his jokes--for many a joke had he-- Full well the busy whisper circling round Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned."

As the piece proceeds, the delicately chiding satire is delightful, ringing at last with the laughing lines:

"And still they gazed, and still their wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew."

Seven years had elapsed between the birth of Oliver and the child that preceded him. His elder brother Henry had superior qualities which were early marked. To these his father gave great attention, lavishing his means upon this boy's education. Oliver was destined for commercial life in the paternal projection of those affairs and eventualities of which men imagine they are masters. The force of impressions that fall upon the mind in childhood must be strongest in those children whose imaginations are most vivid. Listening to Paddy Byrne made Oliver in heart and mind a wayward rover all his life.

Something of the imprudence of the little man came, it might be said, from this dash of the recklessness of the old soldier and adventurer infused into imaginative infant hopefulness. From this same instructor he also gathered his devotion to books and poetry, which proved a revelation that changed his father's purpose of fitting him for a commercial calling.

Henry Goldsmith is known and remembered now through the poetic expressions of honour and affection bestowed upon him by his brother.

One cannot tell at this hour whether the deeper sense of reverence should fall upon his character or upon that grat.i.tude through which alone it lives.

In the childhood of Oliver Goldsmith, his brightness and the foreshadowings of future force were not alone among the elements within the little heart which lay neglected by those he loved and whose lives he lighted, though they knew it not. In due course he was despatched to another school, thirty miles away. He lived with his uncle, Mr. John Goldsmith, a landed gentleman, and attended the school at Elphin; and at eleven years of age was sent to another and a more reputed Academy nearer home, at Athlone. Two years here and four at Edgeworthstown completed his schooling at the age of seventeen.

Of the Vicar of Wakefield, and thence of the father of little Oliver, it was said that all his adventures were by his own fireside, and all his travels from one room to another. He was in all likelihood a delicate man, and certainly deeply religious, with a high sense of honour and common moral obligation. The _Vicar of Wakefield_, his best portrait, stands an honourable and an imperishable filial tribute, the fairest ever paid by son to sire.

One day, when this young Master Goldsmith was in his teens, he left home for Edgeworthstown, riding a good horse, borrowed from a friend, and in high glee, if money braces the manly heart. With a golden guinea in his purse, he was as proud as wealth untold can make a buoyant spirit, in the days when life is very bright and happiness is everywhere. He loitered on the journey. The horse nigh slept, whilst the rider mooned on in meditative peace, and a lad's romantic building up of airy castellations. Instead of achieving his actual destination by nightfall, he was still miles away from the appointed place.

Nothing daunted, with a proud and mighty air, he paused in the streets of Ardagh to ask a wayfarer where he could find the best house of entertainment. This question, it happened, was addressed to the greatest wag in the vicinity.

The wit, a jocose fencing-master, Mr. Cornelius Kelly, now fenced with words, and in all his life never did defter work. He pointed to the house of old Squire Featherston, rightly averring no better entertainment or hospitality could be found anywhere in all the world than in that generous and hearty home. Thus mistaking this private house and family mansion for an inn, the youth approached the place, and the wag went on his way. Oliver gave the bell a good ring, told the man to take his horse, and sauntered into the commodious parlour of the Squire as if it had been the public room in some well-supplied hotel. The Squire soon detected the mistake that had been made, and knowing the father of the boy, seized upon the diverting situation, entering with all his heart into the possibilities the joke might yield. He turned landlord for the nonce, brought in the supper piping hot, and then was ordered to bring a bottle of good wine. This the lad cordially, yet with some condescension, shared with the supposed master of the hostelry. More than this, at last putting all pride of place aside, he told the good man to bring his wife and daughter to the table. Oliver gave minute and particular orders for a good breakfast on the morrow, and then went to bed.

We can picture the sweetly smiling daughter of the Squire, rippling with laughter and every moment more bewitching.

We wonder what this prototype of Miss Hardcastle was like to look upon, and whether her heart was as tender, and her wit and grace as charming, as that of the character she at least did something to inspire.

In the morning when master Oliver expected to part for ever with that guinea in his pocket, he learned the actual state of things and left no poorer than he came, but all the richer for the laughter and the merriment and the good wishes of the friends, who, to divert and amuse both him and themselves, had treated their guest so well.

In Trinity College, at the time when Goldsmith studied there as a sizar, menial offices were involved in this dubious position. Amongst these were sweeping the courts in the morning, carrying up the dishes from the kitchen to the Fellows' table, waiting for dinner until all the rest had finished, and wearing a garb to signalise inferiority and degradation. Common manliness cannot suffer indignities of this sort.

Johnson at Oxford and Goldsmith in Dublin rebelled. The agonised sense of decent justice could not be stifled. In such contexts, only cowards can wish dishonour borne and indignation unrevealed. Oliver himself had none of those conventional prejudices that raise Universities to fetishes. Like the man he was, he would have been content to enter some true trade.

His relatives had other thoughts. That faithful clergyman, his uncle Contarine, persuaded his nephew into those paths of decorous ignorance in which the ranks of the respectable tread their gentle way, and are not rude enough to question custom. He in his time had been a sizar, and had not found the duties devolving lowering or an impediment, as he said, to intimacy and a.s.sociation with the great and good. The reason why Goldsmith's career at Dublin was not radiant was d.o.g.g.i.ng poverty. In the midst of penury no sooner was money in his pockets than silver and copper sped in response to any pet.i.tion made upon his unfailing if not unerring charity.

The poor fellow gave the very clothing from his bed. In the anguish of pity, giving blankets, and sleeping cold and being laughed at and scorned, involved the warranty of self-suffering upon the eager deed.

The lad lived in utter misery through the brutal tyranny of his tutor, Wilder, a dissolute drunkard, a disgrace to his own times and incomprehensible to ours. Death overtook this man in a drunken brawl.

His crimes were not without attenuating circ.u.mstances. College tutors have trials enough to crush their characters, when they have characters to crush.

Living in actual need as far as money was concerned, and a dest.i.tution of interest more to be pitied, Oliver pa.s.sed in obscurity through the University. The Rev. Charles Goldsmith, dying in 1747, made the position of his son even more precarious and pathetic, and a career of mishap and misunderstanding still harder to endure. We find dear Noll failing in scholarships, or losing through mere negligence the prizes he had gained, and, lastly, with a philosophic indifference to the transitory nature of mortal learning, p.a.w.ning the books he ought to have studied. It was a doleful business. He had, as he said, "a knack of hoping." It must have been a clever trick, for it never quite failed. He wrote ballads that were bought up eagerly, and merrily sung, cheering the poor in the common streets of Dublin. He made a shilling or two now and then upon these transactions. These, we can imagine, brought him more pride and pleasure than academic prowess could have afforded. One night he gave a supper to his friends, who were all of a lively and hilarious order, and was for this, before his a.s.sembled guests, thrashed by his tutor for his breach of college discipline. Selling his remaining books and his clothes, he fled from this scene of many sorrows. At Dublin, Goldsmith's diligence, however faulty, was enough to gain for him commendation from time to time, but no distinction worth mentioning. His worst crime is seen in a riot in which he was not a ringleader. He sc.r.a.ped into his sc.r.a.pes as he sc.r.a.ped through his examinations.

These days were most desolate. His flight was not final. Reconciled to his condition, he graduated in 1749, his name as usual the last upon the list. When, later in life, he penned his _Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning_, he wrote from bitter experience. Allied with Johnson in the feeling of humiliation at the position of a sizar in a College, Goldsmith went further, and questioned the whole policy of education at our schools and Universities. It is hardly too much to hold him one of the pioneers of modern methods, and those new, slowly-growing principles, which mark our present somewhat broader enlightenment.

Leaving the University, and returning to his mother's house at Ballymahon, Goldsmith loafed about lazily, good-humouredly, and merrily, taking things just as they came. To bear with him in patience was hard for the members of his family. Our young, dreaming, and delightful poet may not have been a blessing at home. Another hearth saw this minstrel in his happiest vein. Pa.s.sing his evenings at an inn, he gleaned there a knowledge of mankind of which in later years he made capital use. In time a finer audience than that he cheered at this village ale-house, greeted a fairer humour when this tavern, immortalised in happy memory, was seen in _She Stoops to Conquer_. At this village hostelry, merriment, and not indulgence, ruled delighted hours. In this haven of hilarity Oliver sang ditties and told stories that blessed his boon companions. One recalls Shenstone's words:

"Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn."

It may seem difficult to discover a hero rejoicing in comrades discovered in a village ale-house. Still less should we expect to find in a heart pleased so easily a man of refined and exquisite sensibility. Oliver Goldsmith, revelling in friends coa.r.s.e and cra.s.s to superficial vision, must have found in them gleams of holiness that lives less loving could not discern.

CHAPTER II

"THE DESERTED VILLAGE"

The wandering boy, stricken with grief at the pain and the poverty he sees, alike in town and village in Ireland, foreshadows and unveils the coming man, who, knowing his own anxieties, was ever more distressed by the cares and afflictions he beheld than by those through which he was at any time himself the sufferer.

In all the careers of the essentially great, there are times when laughter will mingle with the honour we bestow, and compa.s.sion oust our adoration from its throne. Laughter may grow derisive and compa.s.sion scornful. Contempt has one virtue--it recoils. Derision can find no room within the fathoming comprehension that does not forget the ceaseless pressure of those ruthless surroundings in which often n.o.blest lives are framed.

Pope's line on Gay pictures Goldsmith: