Oliver Goldsmith Part 2

There is a grace--nay, more, there is a genius in transition. The exile and the emigration of the Irish were not, and are not now, exclusively territorial, nor is the spiritual pang of leaving loved homes and cherished hearts entirely sentimental. Of the Irish it may be said that, of all the races, their pure love of home is the deepest, and the most faithful and devoted. Often the enforced exile that must be endured had no solace save death and the grave for peace--and a home. Of all the fair, and the gentle and pure, fairest and gentlest and purest, now and ever, is the Irish girl. Swift the pa.s.sage in this tender poem from the village in its sunshine to the town and the streets in their darkness, and the clouds about the life of outcast humanity, suffering a more fearful exile:

"Where the poor houseless shivering female lies: She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest, Has wept at tales of innocence distrest.

Her modest looks the cottage might adorn, Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn; Now lost to all, her friends, her virtue, fled, Near her betrayer's door she lays her head."

The wonders of the poem are first its pathos, and then its picturesqueness and its charm. With all these glidings from light to grave and gladness into gloom, and then again to gaiety, it is a moving and a magic intermingling. There is a very thunder in the phrase,

"Pamper luxury, and thin mankind."

And then later:

"Oh, luxury! thou curst by Heaven's decree, How ill-exchanged are things like these for thee!

How do thy potions, with insidious joy, Diffuse their pleasures, only to destroy.

Kingdoms by thee, to sickly greatness grown, Boast of a florid vigour not their own.

At every draught more large and large they grow, A bloated ma.s.s of rank, unwieldy woe; Till sapped their strength, and every part unsound, Down, down they sink, and spread a ruin round."

In this poem we find the sympathy and the grace of Gray and Wordsworth with a greater warmth and a glow that is enkindling. The man who is a master in transition is also and perforce powerful in contrast. In this graceful gift the whole piece is a striking study. Whether the strain be didactic or dramatic, emotional or vivacious, melody is never lost. With many poets frequently the whole melodiousness of poetry disappears in the prose of a too palpably proclaimed philosophy. This poem from a pure heart, and these lines from a loving life, enlighten, but do not tease the mind. There is a prayer in the words,

"Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain, Teach him that states of native strength possest, Though very poor, may still be very blest."

This poem, and also and not less _The Traveller_, although it is a tale of wandering, beyond all else, reveal the light and the love of the home.

CHAPTER III

"THE TRAVELLER"

At the University of Edinburgh, Goldsmith became a more earnest student. He was certainly not without the higher aspirations of the sublime profession to which circ.u.mstance and necessity rather than apt.i.tude or inclination had called him. Whilst it may be questioned whether he ever had the poetic imagination of the physician, he never allowed the honour in which he held the vocation to lessen, and never lost the satisfaction he himself cherished through his a.s.sociation with this calling. To the last he was proud of being--or as his cynical critic might say, of counting himself--a doctor. In Scotland he worked harder, studied chemistry with intelligence, and evinced considerable ability. He viewed with ardour his prospective work in life, and was keenly interested in the medical system and the surgical processes of that period. As a student he was respected. He became a conspicuous member of the Medical Society. It is needless, however, to add that his studies were not so strenuous as to make his mood at any time monastic, compelling him to live heedless of pa.s.sing pleasures and delightful days, or forgetful of his fellow-men.

Goldsmith had been very poor in Dublin. He was not rich in Edinburgh, but he was welcomed in the refined circles of both University and civic society. He discovered his place amongst graceful and gracious women and high-minded and cultured men, and then, all at once, amid all his new-found success and happiness, he unexpectedly closed his medical career at the University and left not less suddenly than he had come. Nothing could be more abrupt than his departure. Rumour has it that, with chaotic benevolence, he had become security for one of his fellow-students for a considerable sum of money on account of a tailor's bill. Here we have the prototype of "the good-natured man."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Rischgitz Collection._]

GOLDSMITH AS A YOUNG MAN.

(From the rare etching by Bretherton after Bunbury's drawing.)]

Goldsmith could make nothing of mathematics, and held this science fit only for mean intellects. Later in his life this delightful philosopher confided to Malone that he still held the study in a kind of scorn, seeing that he could himself turn an ode of Horace into English better than any of the mathematicians. There is scarcely an infinitesimal sign of the principle of mathematical precision about the career of Oliver Goldsmith. Yet in Scotland, possibly because the virtue of prudence is infectious, during this period, for some time and by some miracle, Noll cultivated a habit to which he was throughout his career very slightly addicted--he paid his way. Yet when he was leaving this centre of learning we find Uncle Contarine once more besought, and this time for twenty rapidly forthcoming sterling pounds, to carry Mr. Oliver to the Continent for the completion of his medical education. The wandering spirit had seized him. Paris and Leyden, with their learned lecturers, were but pretexts for travelling and fulfilling the long-cherished hope of seeing foreign lands. He thirsted for deep draughts of experience flowing from the hidden springs of unknown climes. Professor Ma.s.son wittily tells us that as Goldsmith had planned to go to Paris, of course he arrived in the end at Leyden. Having secured those necessary munitions of war which to the full extent of his means Uncle Contarine unfailingly provided, Goldsmith set sail in a ship bound for Bordeaux.

At Newcastle he was, by mistake, arrested as a political prisoner and retained in durance as a Jacobite. The ship sailed without him. It sank; every life was lost. Soon after reaching Leyden, Goldsmith left that seat of learning for his wanderings through Europe, his only aids to this majestic design being a fine voice and an instrument of music--some sort of flute, we must presume. It was a queer pilgrimage.

The peasantry gave the minstrel food by day and a bed at night.

Village after village welcomed him. He left Leyden penniless. He might have had a useful coin or two to help him, but that, espying some lovely flowers, he could not resist buying all his poor purse permitted and sending them to Uncle Contarine. No long-suffering uncle, in all the chronicles and all the untold trials of uncles, deserved better of a nephew than this good old man.

Goldsmith's ramble through Europe was one of the maddest escapades in the records of the eccentricities of adolescent genius. The enterprise was attended with ceaseless difficulty, danger, and deprivation. Not seldom the hedgeside yielded him his nightly rest. Places of learning from time to time gave the wanderer a dinner. He could make the monasteries havens of repose. For a little while he acted as guide and tutor to the son of some wealthy manufacturer. This youth cared nothing for architecture or antiquity, the histories of cities, or natural scenery. His sole purpose seemed to be to save money on his travels. The liberal and lively tutor left a pupil as dull as he was mean. The love of wandering lay deep in Goldsmith's heart. This early pilgrimage through much of Europe inspired his pen to write _The Traveller_. In later years he had throughout this eager longing for a roving life.

Notwithstanding his roaming, in some inexplicable manner, Goldsmith, the pilgrim of improvidence and knight errant from the Order of Chivalrous Carelessness, still pursued his medical studies, and carried this training for the vocation of a doctor to some kind of completion. Italy is supposed to have conferred his diploma as a physician upon Goldsmith, and either Padua or Louvain has the honour.

_The Traveller_ must, indeed, long have been in all its grace and beauty treasured in his heart, for he actually penned lines for this fine poem during these boyish wanderings through Europe.

This sojourn on the Continent occupied two years or more. He reached England in the year 1756, landing at Dover. This penniless pilgrim made his way on foot, bravely trudging the highroad, with few hopes of coming fame, but many pangs of very present poverty. Our minstrel gathered a little money here and there by singing ditties and ballads, spontaneous compositions, delightfully original, to cheer him and the laughing rustic hearts he met and loved, lads and maids, old men and children, and all, forthwith and henceforth and for ever, his friends.

Tramping from Dover, receiving a warm English welcome at many a wayside farm, and the hearty hospitality of the cottage hearth and home; anon sleeping in barns, or, if need be, making the hedgerow his haven and shelter for the night, pa.s.sing village after village--the days went by, and then he sighted the great town of great trial. He entered London, the city of cities, with its innumerable mult.i.tudes and its untold loneliness.

No one can read the opening line in _The Traveller_--

"Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow"--

without feeling that the words could only have sprung from very genius. We have here that uniqueness that signalises and divides.

Throughout there is that sincerity of sentiment which separates and guides those deeper natures who amid all joys know the vein of sorrow prevailing in the human heart. From yearning aspiration comes that exaltation which connotes the higher character. It is this element that we are apt to forget in our humorists. Lamb, Hood, Thackeray, and Goldsmith, had strains of reflection which went more into the very heart of being and not being, fulfilling and failing, living and dying, than we can ever discover in those who decorate their days with a clamant seriousness. That semblance of earnestness accepted by the populace often lacks poetic force and sublime sanction. _The Traveller_ attains the heights and depths of the Divine communion that unites poetry with prayer. The speeding pen, the quivering lips, the moving mind, and beating heart, are slight contrasted with this prayerful yearning of the unseen and spiritual. Poetry is the unutterable, yet sweetly and strangely uttered voicing of the soul ineffable.

_She Stoops to Conquer_ inspired Sheridan with his inimitable dramatic conceptions. _The Traveller_ roused Byron to the heights he attained in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." _The Traveller_ heralds an era and proclaims the true imperial note, clear and triumphant. If poetry be the prophetic vein, calling an age to realise its aspirations, foreseeing, forewarning, and foremaking coming time, then here the poet, the maker, and the creator, speaks. Nor kings nor warriors rule, but thinkers, and amongst these rulers in the high realm of thought and spiritual power, highest of all in every age and clime--the poet! Hidden in the soul's depths we discover an earnestness which in the outward light-hearted man we fail to recognise. That one we thought we knew so well, we find, too late, we knew, if not altogether ill, at least too slightingly. The poem is doubtless too didactic at times to always move consummate delight.

There is a ring more Latin than English in the line,

"Wealth, commerce, honour, liberty, content."

Yet even in this we see how words can weigh with meaning, and not one prove wasted, but each contributes to the fulfilling of the complete intention. This line has that poetic power which in one single flash can show what volumes men might write and not reveal. Pope crippled meaning and weakened force to procure a rhyme--nay, since he actually planned the rhymes to make his couplets before he penned his poetry, to him not infrequently it was far more to rhyme than realise. In Goldsmith's couplet,

"Till carried to excess in each domain, This favourite good begets peculiar pain,"

we have a dissertation upon both individual and national ethics, and the sole secret of the failures of men and States. There appear pa.s.sages where Goldsmith held Virgil much in view. To some extent this poem, and also _The Deserted Village_, remind one of Volney. In this light the style in places is more French than English. There is full force in the phrase,

"And e'en in penance, planning sins anew."

While the poem is always graceful, readers are not at their happiest when pleasing poets turn philosophers. Throughout the piece there is a manly courage, a purity of motive, a magnanimous ideality, and an unexpected and almost muscular robustness. What gaiety there is in this phrase--

"Sport and flutter in a kinder sky."

We have, when he comes to France, upon which country he writes delightfully, a couplet happily autobiographical:

"Yet would the village praise my wondrous power, And dance forgetful of the noontide hour."

Radiant must have been the moments when later the little man in Fleet Street could look back on scenes like these. We wish that his own graceful pen had granted us a full and vivid record of his roamings.

It cannot be said that from the higher standpoint Goldsmith owed much to Dublin, Edinburgh, Leyden, or Louvain. His cla.s.s-rooms for the study of life were provided in rustic inns, his studious chambers village greens in the land where he was born, French riversides, Swiss mountains, Italian lakes, the blue skies of many climes, and later the crowded streets of the London he loved. His books were the hearts of women, the smiles of children, and the lives of men.

CHAPTER IV

LONDON

Young Oliver Goldsmith, diffident and with no adroitness of address, was not one of those authors who can take publishers by storm, and fame with a wave of the hand. He was a nervous man. Although one of the most collected of writers, he had to be fully at his ease before, in conversation or the common intercourse of society, he could be himself and reveal that force of mind and invincibility of personality that mark his influence and creates his charm. He knew and felt his weakness. When Johnson narrated his adventures in a close and friendly gossip with the King, Goldsmith said:

"Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should have done, for I should have bowed and stammered through the whole of it."

Goldsmith's face must have shone in moments of animation, its very ugliness gaining a beauty all its own, more lovable for that transformation one smile creates. He may have had an uncouth appearance and an awkward bearing. The charm and gentleness of such a spirit as his must have outweighed accidents of form. Now we a.s.sociate an inevitable purity and tenderness with him and with all he ever did.

If he had a poor outward mien and fashion, men must have thought nothing of this compared to the inward grace of the heart and love-illumined soul of the man.

Alone in London, he had come to his fierce fight: not for fame, but for bread. Through all his squalid wanderings in the hard times, and all his sordid trials, he sustained his cheerfulness, and in a selfless supremacy ever strove to bestow on other lives the faith and courage his own bright heart never wholly lost. How he lived in these early days in London no one knows, and the tale of want, care, and humiliation incident to gnawing peril and privation made a story too agonising for him, open as he was, ever to fully reveal. He said one day very quietly: "When I lived among the beggars in Axe Lane."