Though considered by them a
masterly composition, they thought the literary character of the poet not
defined with sufficient exactness, and they preferred that the epitaph
should be in English rather than Latin, as "the memory of so eminent an
English writer ought to be perpetuated in the language to which his works
were likely to be so lasting an ornament.
masterly composition, they thought the literary character of the poet not
defined with sufficient exactness, and they preferred that the epitaph
should be in English rather than Latin, as "the memory of so eminent an
English writer ought to be perpetuated in the language to which his works
were likely to be so lasting an ornament.
Oliver Goldsmith
He had not his usual solace of
a country retreat; his health was impaired and his spirits depressed. Sir
Joshua Reynolds, who perceived the state of his mind, kindly gave him much
of his company. In the course of their interchange of thought, Goldsmith
suggested to him the story of Ugolino, as a subject for his pencil. The
painting founded on it remains a memento of their friendship.
On the 4th of August we find them together at Vauxhall; at that time a
place in high vogue, and which had once been to Goldsmith a scene of
Oriental splendor and delight. We have, in fact, in the Citizen of the
World, a picture of it as it had struck him in former years and in his
happier moods. "Upon entering the gardens," says the Chinese philosopher,
"I found every sense occupied with more than expected pleasure; the lights
everywhere glimmering through the scarcely-moving trees; the full-bodied
concert bursting on the stillness of the night; the natural concert of the
birds in the more retired part of the grove, vying with that which was
formed by art; the company gayly dressed, looking satisfaction, and the
tables spread with various delicacies, all conspired to fill my imagination
with the visionary happiness of the Arabian lawgiver, and lifted me into an
ecstasy of admiration. " [Footnote: Citizen of the World, Letter xxi]
Everything now, however, is seen with different eyes; with him it is
dissipation without pleasure; and he finds it impossible any longer, by
mingling in the gay and giddy throng of apparently prosperous and happy
beings, to escape from the carking care which is clinging to his heart.
His kind friend, Cradock, came up to town toward autumn, when all the
fashionable world was in the country, to give his wife the benefit of a
skillful dentist. He took lodgings in Norfolk Street, to be in Goldsmith's
neighborhood, and passed most of his mornings with him. "I found him," he
says, "much altered and at times very low. He wished me to look over and
revise some of his works; but, with a select friend or two, I was more
pressing that he should publish by subscription his two celebrated poems of
the Traveler and the Deserted Village, with notes. " The idea of Cradock was
that the subscription would enable wealthy persons, favorable to Goldsmith,
to contribute to his pecuniary relief without wounding his pride.
"Goldsmith," said he, "readily gave up to me his private copies, and said,
'Pray do what you please with them. ' But while he sat near me, he rather
submitted to than encouraged my zealous proceedings.
"I one morning called upon him, however, and found him infinitely better
than I had expected; and, in a kind of exulting style, he exclaimed, 'Here
are some of the best of my prose writings; _I have been hard at work
since midnight,_ and I desire you to examine them. ' 'These,' said I,
'are excellent indeed. ' 'They are,' replied he, 'intended as an
introduction to a body of arts and sciences. '"
Poor Goldsmith was, in fact, gathering together the fragments of his
shipwreck; the notes and essays and memoranda collected for his dictionary,
and proposed to found on them a work in two volumes, to be entitled A
Survey of Experimental Philosophy.
The plan of the subscription came to nothing, and the projected survey
never was executed. The head might yet devise, but the heart was failing
him; his talent at hoping, which gave him buoyancy to carry out his
enterprises, was almost at an end.
Cradock's farewell scene with him is told in a simple but touching manner.
"The day before I was to set out for Leicestershire I insisted upon his
dining with us. He replied, 'I will, but on one condition, that you will
not ask me to eat anything. ' 'Nay,' said I, 'this answer is absolutely
unkind, for I had hoped, as we are supplied from the Crown and Anchor, that
you would have named something you might have relished. ' 'Well,' was the
reply, 'if you will but explain it to Mrs. Cradock, I will certainly wait
upon you. '
"The doctor found, as usual, at my apartments, newspapers and pamphlets,
and with a pen and ink he amused himself as well as he could. I had ordered
from the tavern some fish, a roasted joint of lamb, and a tart; and the
doctor either sat down or walked about just as he pleased. After dinner he
took some wine with biscuits; but I was obliged soon to leave him for a
while, as I had matters to settle prior to my next day's journey. On my
return coffee was ready, and the doctor appeared more cheerful (for Mrs.
Cradock was always rather a favorite with him), and in the evening he
endeavored to talk and remark as usual, but all was forced. He stayed till
midnight, and I insisted on seeing him safe home, and we most cordially
shook hands at the Temple gate. " Cradock little thought that this was to be
their final parting. He looked back to it with mournful recollections in
after years, and lamented that he had not remained longer in town at every
inconvenience, to solace the poor broken-spirited poet.
The latter continued in town all the autumn. At the opening of the Opera
House, on the 20th of November, Mrs. Yates, an actress whom he held in
great esteem, delivered a poetical exordium of his composition. Beauclerc,
in a letter to Lord Charlemont, pronounced it very good, and predicted that
it would soon be in all the papers. It does not appear, however, to have
been ever published. In his fitful state of mind Goldsmith may have taken
no care about it, and thus it has been lost to the world, although it was
received with great applause by a crowded and brilliant audience.
A gleam of sunshine breaks through the gloom that was gathering over the
poet. Toward the end of the year he receives another Christmas invitation
to Barton. A country Christmas! with all the cordiality of the fireside
circle, and the joyous revelry of the oaken hall--what a contrast to the
loneliness of a bachelor's chambers in the Temple! It is not to be
resisted. But how is poor Goldsmith to raise the ways and means? His purse
is empty; his booksellers are already in advance to him. As a last
resource, he applies to Garrick. Their mutual intimacy at Barton may have
suggested him as an alternative. The old loan of forty pounds has never
been paid; and Newbery's note, pledged as a security, has never been taken
up. An additional loan of sixty pounds is now asked for, thus increasing
the loan to one hundred; to insure the payment, he now offers, besides
Newbery's note, the transfer of the comedy of the Good-Natured Man to Drury
Lane, with such alterations as Garrick may suggest. Garrick, in reply,
evades the offer of the altered comedy, alludes significantly to a new one
which Goldsmith had talked of writing for him, and offers to furnish the
money required on his own acceptance.
The reply of Goldsmith bespeaks a heart brimful of gratitude and
overflowing with fond anticipations of Barton and the smiles of its fair
residents. "My dear friend," writes he, "I thank you. I wish I could do
something to serve you. I shall have a comedy for you in a season, or two
at furthest, that I believe will be worth your acceptance, for I fancy I
will make it a fine thing. You shall have the refusal. . . . I will draw upon
you one month after date for sixty pounds, and your acceptance will be
ready money, _part of which I want to go down to Barton with_. May God
preserve my honest little man, for he has my heart. Ever,
"OLIVER GOLDSMITH. "
And having thus scrambled together a little pocket-money, by hard
contrivance, poor Goldsmith turns his back upon care and trouble, and
Temple quarters, to forget for a time his desolate bachelorhood in the
family circle and a Christmas fireside at Barton.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
A RETURN TO DRUDGERY--FORCED GAYETY--RETREAT TO THE COUNTRY--THE POEM OF
RETALIATION--PORTRAIT OF GARRICK--OF GOLDSMITH--OF REYNOLDS--ILLNESS OF THE
POET--HIS DEATH--GRIEF OF HIS FRIENDS--A LAST WORD RESPECTING THE JESSAMY
BRIDE
The Barton festivities are over; Christmas, with all its home-felt revelry
of the heart, has passed like a dream; the Jessamy Bride has beamed her
last smile upon the poor poet, and the early part of 1774 finds him in his
now dreary bachelor abode in the Temple, toiling fitfully and hopelessly at
a multiplicity of tasks. His Animated Nature, so long delayed, so often
interrupted, is at length announced for publication, though it has yet to
receive a few finishing touches. He is preparing a third History of
England, to be compressed and condensed in one volume, for the use of
schools. He is revising his Inquiry into Polite Learning, for which he
receives the pittance of five guineas, much needed in his present
scantiness of purse; he is arranging his Survey of Experimental Philosophy,
and he is translating the Comic Romance of Scarron. Such is a part of the
various labors of a drudging, depressing kind, by which his head is made
wrong and his heart faint. "If there is a mental drudgery," says Sir Walter
Scott, "which lowers the spirits and lacerates the nerves, like the toil of
a slave, it is that which is exacted by literary composition, when the
heart is not in unison with the work upon which the head is employed. Add
to the unhappy author's task sickness, sorrow, or the pressure of
unfavorable circumstances, and the labor of the bondsman becomes light in
comparison. " Goldsmith again makes an effort to rally his spirits by going
into gay society. "Our club," writes Beauclerc to Charlemont, on the 12th
of February, "has dwindled away to nothing. Sir Joshua and Goldsmith have
got into such a round of pleasures that they have no time. " This shows how
little Beauclerc was the companion of the poet's mind, or could judge of
him below the surface. Reynolds, the kind participator in joyless
dissipation, could have told a different story of his companion's
heart-sick gayety.
In this forced mood Goldsmith gave entertainments in his chambers in the
Temple; the last of which was a dinner to Johnson, Reynolds, and others of
his intimates, who partook with sorrow and reluctance of his imprudent
hospitality. The first course vexed them by its needless profusion. When a
second, equally extravagant, was served up, Johnson and Reynolds declined
to partake of it; the rest of the company, understanding their motives,
followed their example, and the dishes went from the table untasted.
Goldsmith felt sensibly this silent and well-intended rebuke.
The gayeties of society, however, cannot medicine for any length of time a
mind diseased. Wearied by the distractions and harassed by the expenses of
a town life, which he had not the discretion to regulate, Goldsmith took
the resolution, too tardily adopted, of retiring to the serene quiet and
cheap and healthful pleasures of the country, and of passing only two
months of the year in London. He accordingly made arrangements to sell his
right in the Temple chambers, and in the month of March retired to his
country quarters at Hyde, there to devote himself to toil. At this
dispirited juncture, when inspiration seemed to be at an end, and the
poetic fire extinguished, a spark fell on his combustible imagination and
set it in a blaze.
He belonged to a temporary association of men of talent, some of them
members of the Literary Club, who dined together occasionally at the St.
James' Coffee-house. At these dinners, as usual, he was one of the last to
arrive. On one occasion, when he was more dilatory than usual, a whim
seized the company to write epitaphs on him, as "The late Dr. Goldsmith,"
and several were thrown off in a playful vein, hitting off his
peculiarities. The only one extant was written by Garrick, and has been
preserved, very probably, by its pungency:
"Here lies poet Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,
Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor poll. "
Goldsmith did not relish the sarcasm, especially as coming from such a
quarter. He was not very ready at repartee; but he took his time, and in
the interval of his various tasks concocted a series of epigrammatic
sketches, under the title of Retaliation, in which the characters of his
distinguished intimates were admirably hit off, with a mixture of generous
praise and good-humored raillery. In fact, the poem for its graphic truth;
its nice discrimination; its terse good sense, and its shrewd knowledge of
the world, must have electrified the club almost as much as the first
appearance of The Traveler, and let them still deeper into the character
and talents of the man they had been accustomed to consider as their butt.
Retaliation, in a word, closed his accounts with the club, and balanced all
his previous deficiencies.
The portrait of David Garrick is one of the most elaborate in the poem.
When the poet came to touch it off, he had some lurking piques to gratify,
which the recent attack had revived. He may have forgotten David's cavalier
treatment of him, in the early days of his comparative obscurity; he may
have forgiven his refusal of his plays; but Garrick had been capricious in
his conduct in the times of their recent intercourse; sometimes treating
him with gross familiarity, at other times affecting dignity and reserve,
and assuming airs of superiority; frequently he had been facetious and
witty in company at his expense, and lastly he had been guilty of the
couplet just quoted. Goldsmith, therefore, touched off the lights and
shadows of his character with a free hand, and, at the same time, gave a
side hit at his old rival, Kelly, and his critical persecutor, Kenrick, in
making them sycophantic satellites of the actor. Goldsmith, however, was
void of gall, even in his revenge, and his very satire was more humorous
than caustic:
"Here lies David Garrick, describe him who can,
An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man;
As an actor, confess'd without rival to shine;
As a wit, if not first, in the very first line:
Yet, with talents like these, and an excellent heart.
The man had his failings, a dupe to his art.
Like an ill-judging beauty, his colors he spread,
And beplaster'd with rouge his own natural red.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;
'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.
With no reason on earth to go out of his way,
He turn'd and he varied full ten times a day:
Though secure of our hearts, yet confoundedly sick
If they were not his own by finessing and trick:
He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack,
For he knew, when he pleased, he could whistle them back.
Of praise a mere glutton, he swallow'd what came,
And the puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame;
Till his relish, grown callous almost to disease,
Who pepper'd the highest was surest to please.
But let us be candid, and speak out our mind,
If dunces applauded, he paid them in kind.
Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys, and Woodfalls so grave,
What a commerce was yours, while you got and you gavel
How did Grub Street re-echo the shouts that you raised,
While he was be-Rosciused and you were be-praised!
But peace to his spirit, wherever it flies,
To act as an angel and mix with the skies;
Those poets who owe their best fame to his skill,
Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will;
Old Shakespeare receive him with praise and with love,
And Beaumonts and Bens be his Kellys above. "
This portion of Retaliation soon brought a retort from Garrick, which we
insert, as giving something of a likeness of Goldsmith, though in broad
caricature:
"Here, Hermes, says Jove, who with nectar was mellow,
Go fetch me some clay--I will make an odd fellow:
Right and wrong shall be jumbled, much gold and some dross,
Without cause be he pleased, without cause be he cross;
Be sure, as I work, to throw in contradictions,
A great love of truth, yet a mind turn'd to fictions;
Now mix these ingredients, which, warm'd in the baking,
Turn'd to _learning_ and _gaming_, _religion_, and
_raking_,
With the love of a wench, let his writings be chaste;
Tip his tongue with strange matters, his lips with fine taste;
That the rake and the poet o'er all may prevail,
Set fire to the head and set fire to the tail;
For the joy of each sex on the world I'll bestow it,
This scholar, rake, Christian, dupe, gamester, and poet.
Though a mixture so odd, he shall merit great fame,
And among brother mortals be Goldsmith his name;
When on earth this strange meteor no more shall appear,
You, _Hermes_, shall fetch him, to make us sport here. "
The charge of raking, so repeatedly advanced in the foregoing lines, must
be considered a sportive one, founded, perhaps, on an incident or two
within Garrick's knowledge, but not borne out by the course of Goldsmith's
life. He seems to have had a tender sentiment for the sex, but perfectly
free from libertinism. Neither was he an habitual gamester. The strictest
scrutiny has detected no settled vice of the kind. He was fond of a game of
cards, but an unskillful and careless player. Cards in those days were
universally introduced into society. High play was, in fact, a fashionable
amusement, as at one time was deep drinking; and a man might occasionally
lose large sums, and be beguiled into deep potations, without incurring the
character of a gamester or a drunkard. Poor Goldsmith, on his advent into
high society, assumed fine notions with fine clothes; he was thrown
occasionally among high players, men of fortune who could sport their cool
hundreds as carelessly as his early comrades at Ballymahon could their half
crowns. Being at all times magnificent in money matters, he may have played
with them in their own way, without considering that what was sport to them
to him was ruin. Indeed part of his financial embarrassments may have
arisen from losses of the kind, incurred inadvertently, not in the
indulgence of a habit. "I do not believe Goldsmith to have deserved the
name of gamester," said one of his contemporaries; "he liked cards very
well, as other people do, and lost and won occasionally; but as far as I
saw or heard, and I had many opportunities of hearing, never any
considerable sum. If he gamed with any one, it was probably with Beauclerc,
but I do not know that such was the case. "
Retaliation, as we have already observed, was thrown off in parts, at
intervals, and was never completed. Some characters, originally intended to
be introduced, remained unattempted; others were but partially
sketched--such was the one of Reynolds, the friend of his heart, and which
he commenced with a felicity which makes us regret that it should remain
unfinished.
"Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind,
He has not left a wiser or better behind.
His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand;
His manners were gentle, complying, and bland;
Still born to improve us in every part,
His pencil our faces, his manners our heart.
To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering,
When they judged without skill he was still hard of hearing:
When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff.
By flattery unspoiled--"
The friendly portrait stood unfinished on the easel; the hand of the artist
had failed! An access of a local complaint, under which he had suffered for
some time past, added to a general prostration of health, brought Goldsmith
back to town before he had well settled himself in the country. The local
complaint subsided, but was followed by a low nervous fever. He was not
aware of his critical situation, and intended to be at the club on the 25th
of March, on which occasion Charles Fox, Sir Charles Bunbury (one of the
Horneck connection), and two other new members were to be present. In the
afternoon, however, he felt so unwell as to take to his bed, and his
symptoms soon acquired sufficient force to keep him there. His malady
fluctuated for several days, and hopes were entertained of his recovery,
but they proved fallacious. He had skillful medical aid and faithful
nursing, but he would not follow the advice of his physicians, and
persisted in the use of James' powders, which he had once found beneficial,
but which were now injurious to him. His appetite was gone, his strength
failed him, but his mind remained clear, and was perhaps too active for his
frame. Anxieties and disappointments which had previously sapped his
constitution, doubtless aggravated his present complaint and rendered him
sleepless. In reply to an inquiry of his physician, he acknowledged that
his mind was ill at ease. This was his last reply; he was too weak to talk,
and in general took no notice of what was said to him. He sank at last into
a deep sleep, and it was hoped a favorable crisis had arrived. He awoke,
however, in strong convulsions, which continued without intermission until
he expired, on the fourth of April, at five o'clock in the morning; being
in the forty-sixth year of his age.
His death was a shock to the literary world, and a deep affliction to a
wide circle of intimates and friends; for with all his foibles and
peculiarities, he was fully as much beloved as he was admired. Burke, on
hearing the news, burst into tears. Sir Joshua Reynolds threw by his pencil
for the day, and grieved more than he had done in times of great family
distress. "I was abroad at the time of his death," writes Dr. M'Donnell,
the youth whom when in distress he had employed as an amanuensis, "and I
wept bitterly when the intelligence first reached me. A blank came over my
heart as if I had lost one of my nearest relatives, and was followed for
some days by a feeling of despondency. " Johnson felt the blow deeply and
gloomily. In writing some time afterward to Boswell, he observed, "Of poor
Dr. Goldsmith there is little to be told more than the papers have made
public. He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness
of mind. His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources were exhausted.
Sir Joshua is of opinion that he owed no less than two thousand pounds.
Was ever poet so trusted before? "
Among his debts were seventy-nine pounds due to his tailor, Mr. William
Filby, from whom he had received a new suit but a few days before his
death. "My father," said the younger Filby, "though a loser to that amount,
attributed no blame to Goldsmith; he had been a good customer, and had he
lived would have paid every farthing. " Others of his tradespeople evinced
the same confidence in his integrity, notwithstanding his heedlessness. Two
sister milliners in Temple Lane, who had been accustomed to deal with him,
were concerned, when told, some time before his death, of his pecuniary
embarrassments. "Oh, sir," said they to Mr. Cradock, "sooner persuade him
to let us work for him gratis than apply to any other; we are sure he will
pay us when he can. "
On the stairs of his apartment there was the lamentation of the old and
infirm, and the sobbing of women; poor objects of his charity to whom he
had never turned a deaf ear, even when struggling himself with poverty.
But there was one mourner, whose enthusiasm for his memory, could it have
been foreseen, might have soothed the bitterness of death. After the coffin
had been screwed down, a lock of his hair was requested for a lady, a
particular friend, who wished to preserve it as a remembrance. It was the
beautiful Mary Horneck--the Jessamy Bride. The coffin was opened again, and
a lock of hair cut off; which she treasured to her dying day. Poor
Goldsmith! could he have foreseen that such a memorial of him was to be
thus cherished!
One word more concerning this lady, to whom we have so often ventured to
advert. She survived almost to the present day. Hazlitt met her at
Northcote's painting-room, about twenty years since, as Mrs. Gwyn, the
widow of a General Gwyn of the army. She was at that time upward of seventy
years of age. Still, he said, she was beautiful, beautiful even in years.
After she was gone, Hazlitt remarked how handsome she still was. "I do not
know," said Northcote, "why she is so kind as to come to see me, except
that I am the last link in the chain that connects her with all those she
most esteemed when young--Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith--and remind her of
the most delightful period of her life. " "Not only so," observed Hazlitt,
"but you remember what she was at twenty; and you thus bring back to her
the triumphs of her youth--that pride of beauty, which must be the more
fondly cherished as it has no external vouchers, and lives chiefly in the
bosom of its once lovely possessor. In her, however, the Graces had
triumphed over time; she was one of Ninon de l'Enclos' people, of the last
of the immortals. I could almost fancy the shade of Goldsmith in the room,
looking round with complacency. "
The Jessamy Bride survived her sister upward of forty years, and died in
1840, within a few days of completing her eighty-eighth year. "She had gone
through all the stages of life," says Northcote, "and had lent a grace to
each. " However gayly she may have sported with the half-concealed
admiration of the poor awkward poet in the heyday of her youth and beauty,
and however much it may have been made a subject of teasing by her youthful
companions, she evidently prided herself in after years upon having been an
object of his affectionate regard; it certainly rendered her interesting
throughout life in the eyes of his admirers, and has hung a poetical wreath
above her grave.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE FUNERAL--THE MONUMENT--THE EPITAPH--CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the warm feeling of the moment, while the remains of the poet were
scarce cold, it was determined by his friends to honor them by a public
funeral and a tomb in Westminster Abbey. His very pall-bearers were
designated: Lord Shelburne, Lord Lowth, Sir Joshua Reynolds; the Hon. Mr.
Beauclerc, Mr. Burke, and David Garrick. This feeling cooled down, however,
when it was discovered that he died in debt, and had not left wherewithal
to pay for such expensive obsequies. Five days after his death, therefore,
at five o'clock of Saturday evening, the 9th of April, he was privately
interred in the burying-ground of the Temple Church; a few persons
attending as mourners, among whom we do not find specified any of his
peculiar and distinguished friends. The chief mourner was Sir Joshua
Reynolds' nephew, Palmer, afterward Dean of Cashel. One person, however,
from whom it was but little to be expected, attended the funeral and
evinced real sorrow on the occasion. This was Hugh Kelly, once the dramatic
rival of the deceased, and often, it is said, his anonymous assailant in
the newspapers. If he had really been guilty of this basest of literary
offenses, he was punished by the stings of remorse, for we are told that he
shed bitter tears over the grave of the man he had injured. His tardy
atonement only provoked the lash of some unknown satirist, as the following
lines will show:
"Hence Kelly, who years, without honor or shame,
Had been sticking his bodkin in Oliver's fame,
Who thought, like the Tartar, by this to inherit
His genius, his learning, simplicity, spirit;
Now sets every feature to weep o'er his fate,
And acts as a mourner to blubber in state. "
One base wretch deserves to be mentioned, the reptile Kenrick, who, after
having repeatedly slandered Goldsmith while living, had the audacity to
insult his memory when dead. The following distich is sufficient to show
his malignancy, and to hold him up to execration:
"By his own art, who justly died,
A blund'ring, artless suicide:
Share, earthworms, share, since now he's dead,
His megrim, maggot-bitten head. "
This scurrilous epitaph produced a burst of public indignation that awed
for a time even the infamous Kenrick into silence. On the other hand, the
press teemed with tributes in verse and prose to the memory of the
deceased; all evincing the mingled feeling of admiration for the author and
affection for the man.
Not long after his death the Literary Club set on foot a subscription, and
raised a fund to erect a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. It
was executed by Nollekins, and consisted simply of a bust of the poet in
profile, in high relief, in a medallion, and was placed in the area of a
pointed arch, over the south door in Poets' Corner, between the monuments
of Gay and the Duke of Argyle. Johnson furnished a Latin epitaph, which was
read at the table of Sir Joshua Reynolds, where several members of the club
and other friends of the deceased were present.
Though considered by them a
masterly composition, they thought the literary character of the poet not
defined with sufficient exactness, and they preferred that the epitaph
should be in English rather than Latin, as "the memory of so eminent an
English writer ought to be perpetuated in the language to which his works
were likely to be so lasting an ornament. " These objections were reduced to
writing, to be respectfully submitted to Johnson, but such was the awe
entertained of his frown that every one shrank from putting his name first
to the instrument; whereupon their names were written about it in a circle,
making what mutinous sailors call a Round Robin. Johnson received it half
graciously, half grimly. "He was willing," he said, "to modify the sense of
the epitaph in any manner the gentlemen pleased; _but he never would
consent to disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English
inscription_. " Seeing the names of Dr. Wharton and Edmund Burke among
the signers, "he wondered," he said, "that Joe Wharton, a scholar by
profession, should be such a fool; and should have thought that Mund Burke
would have had more sense. " The following is the epitaph as it stands
inscribed on a white marble tablet beneath the bust:
OLIVARII GOLDSMITH,
Poetae, Physici, Historici,
Qui nullum ferè scribendi genus
Non tetigit,
Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit
Sive risus essent movendi,
Sive lacrymae,
Affectuum potens ac lenis dominator:
Ingenio sublimis, vividus, versatilis,
Oratione grandis, nitidus, venustus:
Hoc monumento memoriam coluit
Sodalium amor,
Amicorum fides,
Lectorum veneratio.
Natus in Hibernia Forniae Longfordiensis,
In loco cui nomen Pallas,
Nov. xxix. MDCCXXXI. ;
Eblanse literis institutus;
Obiit Londini,
April iv. MDCCLXXIV.
The following translation is from Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson:
OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH--
A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,
Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,
And touched nothing that he did not adorn;
Of all the passions,
Whether smiles were to be moved or tears,
A powerful yet gentle master;
In genius, sublime, vivid, versatile,
In style, elevated, clear, elegant--
The love of companions,
The fidelity of friends,
And the veneration of readers,
Have by this monument honored the memory.
He was born in Ireland,
At a place called Pallas,
[In the parish] of Forney, [and county] of Longford,
On the 29th Nov. , 1731,[*]
Educated at [the University of] Dublin,
And died in London,
4th April, 1774.
[Footnote *: Incorrect. See page 12. ]
* * * * *
We shall not pretend to follow these anecdotes of the life of Goldsmith
with any critical dissertation on his writings; their merits have long
since been fully discussed, and their station in the scale of literary
merit permanently established. They have outlasted generations of works of
higher power and wider scope, and will continue to outlast succeeding
generations, for they have that magic charm of style by which works are
embalmed to perpetuity. Neither shall we attempt a regular analysis of the
character of the poet, but will indulge in a few desultory remarks in
addition to those scattered throughout the preceding chapters.
Never was the trite, because sage apothegm, that "The child is father to
the man," more fully verified than in the case of Goldsmith. He is shy,
awkward, and blundering in childhood, yet full of sensibility; he is a butt
for the jeers and jokes of his companions, but apt to surprise and confound
them by sudden and witty repartees; he is dull and stupid at his
tasks, yet an eager and intelligent devourer of the traveling tales and
campaigning stories of his half military pedagogue; he may be a dunce, but
he is already a rhymer; and his early scintillations of poetry awaken the
expectations of his friends. He seems from infancy to have been compounded
of two natures, one bright, the other blundering; or to have had fairy
gifts laid in his cradle by the "good people" who haunted his birthplace,
the old goblin mansion on the banks of the Inny.
He carries with him the wayward elfin spirit, if we may so term it,
throughout his career. His fairy gifts are of no avail at school, academy,
or college; they unfit him for close study and practical science, and
render him heedless of everything that does not address itself to his
poetical imagination and genial and festive feelings; they dispose him to
break away from restraint, to stroll about hedges, green lanes, and haunted
streams, to revel with jovial companions, or to rove the country like a
gypsy in quest of odd adventures.
As if confiding in these delusive gifts, he takes no heed of the present
nor care for the future, lays no regular and solid foundation of knowledge,
follows out no plan, adopts and discards those recommended by his friends,
at one time prepares for the ministry, next turns to the law, and then
fixes upon medicine. He repairs to Edinburgh, the great emporium of medical
science, but the fairy gifts accompany him; he idles and frolics away his
time there, imbibing only such knowledge as is agreeable to him; makes an
excursion to the poetical regions of the Highlands; and having walked the
hospitals for the customary time, sets off to ramble over the Continent, in
quest of novelty rather than knowledge. His whole tour is a poetical one.
He fancies he is playing the philosopher while he is really playing the
poet; and though professedly he attends lectures and visits foreign
universities, so deficient is he on his return, in the studies for which he
set out, that he fails in an examination as a surgeon's mate; and while
figuring as a doctor of medicine, is outvied on a point of practice by his
apothecary. Baffled in every regular pursuit, after trying in vain some of
the humbler callings of commonplace life, he is driven almost by chance to
the exercise of his pen, and here the fairy gifts come to his assistance.
For a long time, however, he seems unaware of the magic properties of that
pen; he uses it only as a makeshift until he can find a _legitimate_
means of support. He is not a learned man, and can write but meagerly and
at second-hand on learned subjects; but he has a quick convertible talent
that seizes lightly on the points of knowledge necessary to the
illustration of a theme; his writings for a time are desultory, the fruits
of what he has seen and felt, or what he has recently and hastily read; but
his gifted pen transmutes everything into gold, and his own genial nature
reflects its sunshine through his pages.
Still unaware of his powers he throws off his writings anonymously, to go
with the writings of less favored men; and it is a long time, and after a
bitter struggle with poverty and humiliation, before he acquires confidence
in his literary talent as a means of support, and begins to dream of
reputation.
From this time his pen is a wand of power in his hand, and he has only to
use it discreetly, to make it competent to all his wants. But discretion is
not a part of Goldsmith's nature; and it seems the property of these fairy
gifts to be accompanied by moods and temperaments to render their effect
precarious. The heedlessness of his early days; his disposition for social
enjoyment; his habit of throwing the present on the neck of the future,
still continue. His expenses forerun his means; he incurs debts on the
faith of what his magic pen is to produce, and then, under the pressure of
his debts, sacrifices its productions for prices far below their value. It
is a redeeming circumstance in his prodigality, that it is lavished oftener
upon others than upon himself; he gives without thought or stint, and is
the continual dupe of his benevolence and his trustfulness in human nature.
We may say of him as he says of one of his heroes, "He could not stifle the
natural impulse which he had to do good, but frequently borrowed money to
relieve the distressed; and when he knew not conveniently where to borrow,
he has been observed to shed tears as he passed through the wretched
suppliants who attended his gate. ". . . .
"His simplicity in trusting persons whom he had no previous reasons to
place confidence in, seems to be one of those lights of his character
which, while they impeach his understanding, do honor to his benevolence.
The low and the timid are ever suspicious; but a heart impressed with
honorable sentiments expects from others sympathetic sincerity. " [Footnote:
Goldsmith's Life of Nashe. ]
His heedlessness in pecuniary matters, which had rendered his life a
struggle with poverty even in the days of his obscurity, rendered the
struggle still more intense when his fairy gifts had elevated him into the
society of the wealthy and luxurious, and imposed on his simple and
generous spirit fancied obligations to a more ample and bounteous display.
"How comes it," says a recent and ingenious critic, "that in all the miry
paths of life which he had trod, no speck ever sullied the robe of his
modest and graceful muse. How amid all that love of inferior company, which
never to the last forsook him, did he keep his genius so free from every
touch of vulgarity? "
We answer that it was owing to the innate purity and goodness of his
nature; there was nothing in it that assimilated to vice and vulgarity.
Though his circumstances often compelled him to associate with the poor,
they never could betray him into companionship with the depraved. His
relish for humor and for the study of character, as we have before
observed, brought him often into convivial company of a vulgar kind; but he
discriminated between their vulgarity and their amusing qualities, or
rather wrought from the whole those familiar features of life which form
the staple of his most popular writings.
Much, too, of this intact purity of heart may be ascribed to the lessons of
his infancy under the paternal roof; to the gentle, benevolent, elevated,
unworldly maxims of his father, who "passing rich with forty pounds a
year," infused a spirit into his child which riches could not deprave nor
poverty degrade. Much of his boyhood, too, had been passed in the household
of his uncle, the amiable and generous Contarine; where he talked of
literature with the good pastor, and practiced music with his daughter, and
delighted them both by his juvenile attempts at poetry. These early
associations breathed a grace and refinement into his mind and tuned it up,
after the rough sports on the green, or the frolics at the tavern. These
led him to turn from the roaring glees of the club, to listen to the harp
of his cousin Jane; and from the rustic triumph of "throwing sledge," to a
stroll with his flute along the pastoral banks of the Inny.
The gentle spirit of his father walked with him through life, a pure and
virtuous monitor; and in all the vicissitudes of his career we find him
ever more chastened in mind by the sweet and holy recollections of the home
of his infancy.
It has been questioned whether he really had any religious feeling. Those
who raise the question have never considered well his writings; his Vicar
of Wakefield, and his pictures of the Village Pastor, present religion
under its most endearing forms, and with a feeling that could only flow
from the deep convictions of the heart. When his fair traveling companions
at Paris urged him to read the Church Service on a Sunday, he replied that
"he was not worthy to do it. " He had seen in early life the sacred offices
performed by his father and his brother, with a solemnity which had
sanctified them in his memory; how could he presume to undertake such
functions? His religion has been called in question by Johnson and by
Boswell; he certainly had not the gloomy hypochondriacal piety of the one,
nor the babbling mouth-piety of the other; but the spirit of Christian
charity breathed forth in his writings and illustrated in his conduct give
us reason to believe he had the indwelling religion of the soul.
We have made sufficient comments in the preceding chapters on his conduct
in elevated circles of literature and fashion. The fairy gifts which took
him there were not accompanied by the gifts and graces necessary to sustain
him in that artificial sphere. He can neither play the learned sage with
Johnson, nor the fine gentleman with Beauclerc, though he has a mind
replete with wisdom and natural shrewdness, and a spirit free from
vulgarity. The blunders of a fertile but hurried intellect, and the awkward
display of the student assuming the man of fashion, fix on him a character
for absurdity and vanity which, like the charge of lunacy, it is hard to
disprove, however weak the grounds of the charge and strong the facts in
opposition to it.
In truth, he is never truly in his place in these learned and fashionable
circles, which talk and live for display. It is not the kind of society he
craves. His heart yearns for domestic life; it craves familiar, confiding
intercourse, family firesides, the guileless and happy company of children;
these bring out the heartiest and sweetest sympathies of his nature.
"Had it been his fate," says the critic we have already quoted, "to meet a
woman who could have loved him, despite his faults, and respected him
despite his foibles, we cannot but think that his life and his genius would
have been much more harmonious; his desultory affections would have been
concentered, his craving self-love appeased, his pursuits more settled, his
character more solid. A nature like Goldsmith's, so affectionate, so
confiding--so susceptible to simple, innocent enjoyments--so dependent on
others for the sunshine of existence, does not flower if deprived of the
atmosphere of home. "
The cravings of his heart in this respect are evident, we think, throughout
his career; and if we have dwelt with more significancy than others upon
his intercourse with the beautiful Horneck family, it is because we fancied
we could detect, amid his playful attentions to one of its members, a
lurking sentiment of tenderness, kept down by conscious poverty and a
humiliating idea of personal defects. A hopeless feeling of this kind--the
last a man would communicate to his friends--might account for much of that
fitfulness of conduct, and that gathering melancholy, remarked, but not
comprehended by his associates, during the last year or two of his life;
and may have been one of the troubles of the mind which aggravated his last
illness, and only terminated with his death.
We shall conclude these desultory remarks with a few which have been used
by us on a former occasion. From the general tone of Goldsmith's biography,
it is evident that his faults, at the worst, were but negative, while his
merits were great and decided. He was no one's enemy but his own; his
errors, in the main, inflicted evil on none but himself, and were so
blended with humorous, and even affecting circumstances, as to disarm anger
and conciliate kindness. Where eminent talent is united to spotless virtue,
we are awed and dazzled into admiration, but our admiration is apt to be
cold and reverential; while there is something in the harmless infirmities
of a good and great, but erring individual, that pleads touchingly to our
nature; and we turn more kindly toward the object of our idolatry, when we
find that, like ourselves, he is mortal and is frail. The epithet so often
heard, and in such kindly tones, of "Poor Goldsmith," speaks volumes. Few
who consider the real compound of admirable and whimsical qualities which
form his character would wish to prune away its eccentricities, trim its
grotesque luxuriance, and clip it down to the decent formalities of rigid
virtue. "Let not his frailties be remembered," said Johnson; "he was a very
great man. " But, for our part, we rather say "Let them be remembered,"
since their tendency is to endear; and we question whether he himself would
not feel gratified in hearing his reader, after dwelling with admiration on
the proofs of his greatness, close the volume with the kind-hearted phrase,
so fondly and familiarly ejaculated, of "POOR GOLDSMITH. "
THE COMPLETE
POETICAL WORKS
OF
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
'EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES'
BY
AUSTIN DOBSON
HON. LL. D. EDIN.
PREFATORY NOTE
THIS volume is a reprint, extended and revised, of the 'Selected Poems'
of Goldsmith issued by the Clarendon Press in 1887. It is 'extended,'
because it now contains the whole of Goldsmith's poetry: it is 'revised'
because, besides the supplementary text, a good deal has been added in
the way of annotation and illustration. In other words, the book has
been substantially enlarged. Of the new editorial material, the bulk has
been collected at odd times during the last twenty years; but fresh
Goldsmith facts are growing rare. I hope I have acknowledged obligation
wherever it has been incurred; I trust also, for the sake of those who
come after me, that something of my own will be found to have been
contributed to the literature of the subject.
AUSTIN DOBSON.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chronology of Goldsmith's Life and Poems
POEMS
The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society
The Deserted Village
Prologue of Laberius
On a Beautiful Youth struck Blind with Lightning
The Gift. To Iris, in Bow Street
The Logicians Refuted
A Sonnet
Stanzas on the Taking of Quebec
An Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize
Description of an Author's Bedchamber
On seeing Mrs. *** perform in the Character of ****
On the Death of the Right Hon. ***
An Epigram. Addressed to the Gentlemen reflected on
in 'The Rosciad', a Poem, by the Author
To G. C. and R. L
Translation of a South American Ode
The Double Transformation. A Tale
A New Simile, in the Manner of Swift
Edwin and Angelina
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
Song ('When Lovely Woman,' &c. )
Epilogue to 'The Good Natur'd Man'
Epilogue to 'The Sister'
Prologue to 'Zobeide'
Threnodia Augustalis: Sacred to the Memory of Her
Late Royal Highness the Princess Dowager
of Wales
Song ('Let School-masters,' &c. )
Epilogue to 'She Stoops to Conquer'
Retaliation
Song ('Ah, me! when shall I marry me? ')
Translation ('Chaste are their instincts')
The Haunch of Venison
Epitaph on Thomas Parnell
The Clown's Reply
Epitaph on Edward Purdon
Epilogue for Lee Lewes
Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (1)
Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (2)
The Captivity. An Oratorio
Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner
Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury
Vida's Game of Chess
NOTES
Introduction to the Notes
Editions of the Poems
The Traveller
The Deserted Village
Prologue of Laberius
On a Beautiful Youth struck Blind with Lightning
The Gift
The Logicians Refuted
A Sonnet
Stanzas on the Taking of Quebec
An Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize
Description of an Author's Bedchamber
On seeing Mrs. *** perform in the Character of ****
On the Death of the Right Hon. ***
An Epigram
To G. C. and R. L.
Translation of a South American Ode
The Double Transformation
A New Simile
Edwin and Angelina
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
Song (from 'The Vicar of Wakefield')
Epilogue ('The Good Natur'd Man')
Epilogue ('The Sister')
Prologue ('Zobeide')
Threnodia Augustalis
Song (from 'She Stoops to Conquer')
Epilogue ('She Stoops to Conquer')
Retaliation
Song intended for 'She Stoops to Conquer'
Translation
The Haunch of Venison
Epitaph on Thomas Parnell
The Clown's Reply
Epitaph on Edward Purdon
Epilogue for Lee Lewes's Benefit
Epilogue ('She Stoops to Conquer') (1)
Epilogue ('She Stoops to Conquer') (2)
The Captivity
Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner
Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury
Vida's Game of Chess
APPENDIXES
Portraits of Goldsmith
Descriptions of Newell's Views of Lissoy, &c
The Epithet 'Sentimental'
Fragments of Translations, &c. , by Goldsmith
Goldsmith on Poetry under Anne and George the First
Criticisms from Goldsmith's
'Beauties of English Poesy'
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. From Joseph Marchi's mezzotint of 1770
after the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. . . . . . Frontispiece.
PANE OF GLASS with Goldsmith's autograph signature, dated
March, 1746, now at Trinity College, Dublin. . . . . To face p. xi
VIGNETTE TO THE TRAVELLER. Drawn by Samuel Wale, and
engraved by Charles Grignion . . . . . . . . . . . . To face p. 3
HEADPIECE TO THE TRAVELLER. Engraved on wood by Charlton
Nesbit for Bulmer's 'Poems of Goldsmith and
Parnell', 1795 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 5
THE TRAVELLER. From a design by Richard Westall, R. A. ,
engraved on wood by Thomas Bewick for Bulmer's
'Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell', 1795 . . . . . . . To face p. 8
VIGNETTE TO THE DESERTED VILLAGE, 1770. Drawn and
engraved by Isaac Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To face p. 21
HEADPIECE TO THE DESERTED VILLAGE. Engraved on wood
by Charlton Nesbit for Bulmer's 'Poems of
Goldsmith and Parnell', 1795 . . . . . . . . .
a country retreat; his health was impaired and his spirits depressed. Sir
Joshua Reynolds, who perceived the state of his mind, kindly gave him much
of his company. In the course of their interchange of thought, Goldsmith
suggested to him the story of Ugolino, as a subject for his pencil. The
painting founded on it remains a memento of their friendship.
On the 4th of August we find them together at Vauxhall; at that time a
place in high vogue, and which had once been to Goldsmith a scene of
Oriental splendor and delight. We have, in fact, in the Citizen of the
World, a picture of it as it had struck him in former years and in his
happier moods. "Upon entering the gardens," says the Chinese philosopher,
"I found every sense occupied with more than expected pleasure; the lights
everywhere glimmering through the scarcely-moving trees; the full-bodied
concert bursting on the stillness of the night; the natural concert of the
birds in the more retired part of the grove, vying with that which was
formed by art; the company gayly dressed, looking satisfaction, and the
tables spread with various delicacies, all conspired to fill my imagination
with the visionary happiness of the Arabian lawgiver, and lifted me into an
ecstasy of admiration. " [Footnote: Citizen of the World, Letter xxi]
Everything now, however, is seen with different eyes; with him it is
dissipation without pleasure; and he finds it impossible any longer, by
mingling in the gay and giddy throng of apparently prosperous and happy
beings, to escape from the carking care which is clinging to his heart.
His kind friend, Cradock, came up to town toward autumn, when all the
fashionable world was in the country, to give his wife the benefit of a
skillful dentist. He took lodgings in Norfolk Street, to be in Goldsmith's
neighborhood, and passed most of his mornings with him. "I found him," he
says, "much altered and at times very low. He wished me to look over and
revise some of his works; but, with a select friend or two, I was more
pressing that he should publish by subscription his two celebrated poems of
the Traveler and the Deserted Village, with notes. " The idea of Cradock was
that the subscription would enable wealthy persons, favorable to Goldsmith,
to contribute to his pecuniary relief without wounding his pride.
"Goldsmith," said he, "readily gave up to me his private copies, and said,
'Pray do what you please with them. ' But while he sat near me, he rather
submitted to than encouraged my zealous proceedings.
"I one morning called upon him, however, and found him infinitely better
than I had expected; and, in a kind of exulting style, he exclaimed, 'Here
are some of the best of my prose writings; _I have been hard at work
since midnight,_ and I desire you to examine them. ' 'These,' said I,
'are excellent indeed. ' 'They are,' replied he, 'intended as an
introduction to a body of arts and sciences. '"
Poor Goldsmith was, in fact, gathering together the fragments of his
shipwreck; the notes and essays and memoranda collected for his dictionary,
and proposed to found on them a work in two volumes, to be entitled A
Survey of Experimental Philosophy.
The plan of the subscription came to nothing, and the projected survey
never was executed. The head might yet devise, but the heart was failing
him; his talent at hoping, which gave him buoyancy to carry out his
enterprises, was almost at an end.
Cradock's farewell scene with him is told in a simple but touching manner.
"The day before I was to set out for Leicestershire I insisted upon his
dining with us. He replied, 'I will, but on one condition, that you will
not ask me to eat anything. ' 'Nay,' said I, 'this answer is absolutely
unkind, for I had hoped, as we are supplied from the Crown and Anchor, that
you would have named something you might have relished. ' 'Well,' was the
reply, 'if you will but explain it to Mrs. Cradock, I will certainly wait
upon you. '
"The doctor found, as usual, at my apartments, newspapers and pamphlets,
and with a pen and ink he amused himself as well as he could. I had ordered
from the tavern some fish, a roasted joint of lamb, and a tart; and the
doctor either sat down or walked about just as he pleased. After dinner he
took some wine with biscuits; but I was obliged soon to leave him for a
while, as I had matters to settle prior to my next day's journey. On my
return coffee was ready, and the doctor appeared more cheerful (for Mrs.
Cradock was always rather a favorite with him), and in the evening he
endeavored to talk and remark as usual, but all was forced. He stayed till
midnight, and I insisted on seeing him safe home, and we most cordially
shook hands at the Temple gate. " Cradock little thought that this was to be
their final parting. He looked back to it with mournful recollections in
after years, and lamented that he had not remained longer in town at every
inconvenience, to solace the poor broken-spirited poet.
The latter continued in town all the autumn. At the opening of the Opera
House, on the 20th of November, Mrs. Yates, an actress whom he held in
great esteem, delivered a poetical exordium of his composition. Beauclerc,
in a letter to Lord Charlemont, pronounced it very good, and predicted that
it would soon be in all the papers. It does not appear, however, to have
been ever published. In his fitful state of mind Goldsmith may have taken
no care about it, and thus it has been lost to the world, although it was
received with great applause by a crowded and brilliant audience.
A gleam of sunshine breaks through the gloom that was gathering over the
poet. Toward the end of the year he receives another Christmas invitation
to Barton. A country Christmas! with all the cordiality of the fireside
circle, and the joyous revelry of the oaken hall--what a contrast to the
loneliness of a bachelor's chambers in the Temple! It is not to be
resisted. But how is poor Goldsmith to raise the ways and means? His purse
is empty; his booksellers are already in advance to him. As a last
resource, he applies to Garrick. Their mutual intimacy at Barton may have
suggested him as an alternative. The old loan of forty pounds has never
been paid; and Newbery's note, pledged as a security, has never been taken
up. An additional loan of sixty pounds is now asked for, thus increasing
the loan to one hundred; to insure the payment, he now offers, besides
Newbery's note, the transfer of the comedy of the Good-Natured Man to Drury
Lane, with such alterations as Garrick may suggest. Garrick, in reply,
evades the offer of the altered comedy, alludes significantly to a new one
which Goldsmith had talked of writing for him, and offers to furnish the
money required on his own acceptance.
The reply of Goldsmith bespeaks a heart brimful of gratitude and
overflowing with fond anticipations of Barton and the smiles of its fair
residents. "My dear friend," writes he, "I thank you. I wish I could do
something to serve you. I shall have a comedy for you in a season, or two
at furthest, that I believe will be worth your acceptance, for I fancy I
will make it a fine thing. You shall have the refusal. . . . I will draw upon
you one month after date for sixty pounds, and your acceptance will be
ready money, _part of which I want to go down to Barton with_. May God
preserve my honest little man, for he has my heart. Ever,
"OLIVER GOLDSMITH. "
And having thus scrambled together a little pocket-money, by hard
contrivance, poor Goldsmith turns his back upon care and trouble, and
Temple quarters, to forget for a time his desolate bachelorhood in the
family circle and a Christmas fireside at Barton.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
A RETURN TO DRUDGERY--FORCED GAYETY--RETREAT TO THE COUNTRY--THE POEM OF
RETALIATION--PORTRAIT OF GARRICK--OF GOLDSMITH--OF REYNOLDS--ILLNESS OF THE
POET--HIS DEATH--GRIEF OF HIS FRIENDS--A LAST WORD RESPECTING THE JESSAMY
BRIDE
The Barton festivities are over; Christmas, with all its home-felt revelry
of the heart, has passed like a dream; the Jessamy Bride has beamed her
last smile upon the poor poet, and the early part of 1774 finds him in his
now dreary bachelor abode in the Temple, toiling fitfully and hopelessly at
a multiplicity of tasks. His Animated Nature, so long delayed, so often
interrupted, is at length announced for publication, though it has yet to
receive a few finishing touches. He is preparing a third History of
England, to be compressed and condensed in one volume, for the use of
schools. He is revising his Inquiry into Polite Learning, for which he
receives the pittance of five guineas, much needed in his present
scantiness of purse; he is arranging his Survey of Experimental Philosophy,
and he is translating the Comic Romance of Scarron. Such is a part of the
various labors of a drudging, depressing kind, by which his head is made
wrong and his heart faint. "If there is a mental drudgery," says Sir Walter
Scott, "which lowers the spirits and lacerates the nerves, like the toil of
a slave, it is that which is exacted by literary composition, when the
heart is not in unison with the work upon which the head is employed. Add
to the unhappy author's task sickness, sorrow, or the pressure of
unfavorable circumstances, and the labor of the bondsman becomes light in
comparison. " Goldsmith again makes an effort to rally his spirits by going
into gay society. "Our club," writes Beauclerc to Charlemont, on the 12th
of February, "has dwindled away to nothing. Sir Joshua and Goldsmith have
got into such a round of pleasures that they have no time. " This shows how
little Beauclerc was the companion of the poet's mind, or could judge of
him below the surface. Reynolds, the kind participator in joyless
dissipation, could have told a different story of his companion's
heart-sick gayety.
In this forced mood Goldsmith gave entertainments in his chambers in the
Temple; the last of which was a dinner to Johnson, Reynolds, and others of
his intimates, who partook with sorrow and reluctance of his imprudent
hospitality. The first course vexed them by its needless profusion. When a
second, equally extravagant, was served up, Johnson and Reynolds declined
to partake of it; the rest of the company, understanding their motives,
followed their example, and the dishes went from the table untasted.
Goldsmith felt sensibly this silent and well-intended rebuke.
The gayeties of society, however, cannot medicine for any length of time a
mind diseased. Wearied by the distractions and harassed by the expenses of
a town life, which he had not the discretion to regulate, Goldsmith took
the resolution, too tardily adopted, of retiring to the serene quiet and
cheap and healthful pleasures of the country, and of passing only two
months of the year in London. He accordingly made arrangements to sell his
right in the Temple chambers, and in the month of March retired to his
country quarters at Hyde, there to devote himself to toil. At this
dispirited juncture, when inspiration seemed to be at an end, and the
poetic fire extinguished, a spark fell on his combustible imagination and
set it in a blaze.
He belonged to a temporary association of men of talent, some of them
members of the Literary Club, who dined together occasionally at the St.
James' Coffee-house. At these dinners, as usual, he was one of the last to
arrive. On one occasion, when he was more dilatory than usual, a whim
seized the company to write epitaphs on him, as "The late Dr. Goldsmith,"
and several were thrown off in a playful vein, hitting off his
peculiarities. The only one extant was written by Garrick, and has been
preserved, very probably, by its pungency:
"Here lies poet Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,
Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor poll. "
Goldsmith did not relish the sarcasm, especially as coming from such a
quarter. He was not very ready at repartee; but he took his time, and in
the interval of his various tasks concocted a series of epigrammatic
sketches, under the title of Retaliation, in which the characters of his
distinguished intimates were admirably hit off, with a mixture of generous
praise and good-humored raillery. In fact, the poem for its graphic truth;
its nice discrimination; its terse good sense, and its shrewd knowledge of
the world, must have electrified the club almost as much as the first
appearance of The Traveler, and let them still deeper into the character
and talents of the man they had been accustomed to consider as their butt.
Retaliation, in a word, closed his accounts with the club, and balanced all
his previous deficiencies.
The portrait of David Garrick is one of the most elaborate in the poem.
When the poet came to touch it off, he had some lurking piques to gratify,
which the recent attack had revived. He may have forgotten David's cavalier
treatment of him, in the early days of his comparative obscurity; he may
have forgiven his refusal of his plays; but Garrick had been capricious in
his conduct in the times of their recent intercourse; sometimes treating
him with gross familiarity, at other times affecting dignity and reserve,
and assuming airs of superiority; frequently he had been facetious and
witty in company at his expense, and lastly he had been guilty of the
couplet just quoted. Goldsmith, therefore, touched off the lights and
shadows of his character with a free hand, and, at the same time, gave a
side hit at his old rival, Kelly, and his critical persecutor, Kenrick, in
making them sycophantic satellites of the actor. Goldsmith, however, was
void of gall, even in his revenge, and his very satire was more humorous
than caustic:
"Here lies David Garrick, describe him who can,
An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man;
As an actor, confess'd without rival to shine;
As a wit, if not first, in the very first line:
Yet, with talents like these, and an excellent heart.
The man had his failings, a dupe to his art.
Like an ill-judging beauty, his colors he spread,
And beplaster'd with rouge his own natural red.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;
'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.
With no reason on earth to go out of his way,
He turn'd and he varied full ten times a day:
Though secure of our hearts, yet confoundedly sick
If they were not his own by finessing and trick:
He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack,
For he knew, when he pleased, he could whistle them back.
Of praise a mere glutton, he swallow'd what came,
And the puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame;
Till his relish, grown callous almost to disease,
Who pepper'd the highest was surest to please.
But let us be candid, and speak out our mind,
If dunces applauded, he paid them in kind.
Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys, and Woodfalls so grave,
What a commerce was yours, while you got and you gavel
How did Grub Street re-echo the shouts that you raised,
While he was be-Rosciused and you were be-praised!
But peace to his spirit, wherever it flies,
To act as an angel and mix with the skies;
Those poets who owe their best fame to his skill,
Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will;
Old Shakespeare receive him with praise and with love,
And Beaumonts and Bens be his Kellys above. "
This portion of Retaliation soon brought a retort from Garrick, which we
insert, as giving something of a likeness of Goldsmith, though in broad
caricature:
"Here, Hermes, says Jove, who with nectar was mellow,
Go fetch me some clay--I will make an odd fellow:
Right and wrong shall be jumbled, much gold and some dross,
Without cause be he pleased, without cause be he cross;
Be sure, as I work, to throw in contradictions,
A great love of truth, yet a mind turn'd to fictions;
Now mix these ingredients, which, warm'd in the baking,
Turn'd to _learning_ and _gaming_, _religion_, and
_raking_,
With the love of a wench, let his writings be chaste;
Tip his tongue with strange matters, his lips with fine taste;
That the rake and the poet o'er all may prevail,
Set fire to the head and set fire to the tail;
For the joy of each sex on the world I'll bestow it,
This scholar, rake, Christian, dupe, gamester, and poet.
Though a mixture so odd, he shall merit great fame,
And among brother mortals be Goldsmith his name;
When on earth this strange meteor no more shall appear,
You, _Hermes_, shall fetch him, to make us sport here. "
The charge of raking, so repeatedly advanced in the foregoing lines, must
be considered a sportive one, founded, perhaps, on an incident or two
within Garrick's knowledge, but not borne out by the course of Goldsmith's
life. He seems to have had a tender sentiment for the sex, but perfectly
free from libertinism. Neither was he an habitual gamester. The strictest
scrutiny has detected no settled vice of the kind. He was fond of a game of
cards, but an unskillful and careless player. Cards in those days were
universally introduced into society. High play was, in fact, a fashionable
amusement, as at one time was deep drinking; and a man might occasionally
lose large sums, and be beguiled into deep potations, without incurring the
character of a gamester or a drunkard. Poor Goldsmith, on his advent into
high society, assumed fine notions with fine clothes; he was thrown
occasionally among high players, men of fortune who could sport their cool
hundreds as carelessly as his early comrades at Ballymahon could their half
crowns. Being at all times magnificent in money matters, he may have played
with them in their own way, without considering that what was sport to them
to him was ruin. Indeed part of his financial embarrassments may have
arisen from losses of the kind, incurred inadvertently, not in the
indulgence of a habit. "I do not believe Goldsmith to have deserved the
name of gamester," said one of his contemporaries; "he liked cards very
well, as other people do, and lost and won occasionally; but as far as I
saw or heard, and I had many opportunities of hearing, never any
considerable sum. If he gamed with any one, it was probably with Beauclerc,
but I do not know that such was the case. "
Retaliation, as we have already observed, was thrown off in parts, at
intervals, and was never completed. Some characters, originally intended to
be introduced, remained unattempted; others were but partially
sketched--such was the one of Reynolds, the friend of his heart, and which
he commenced with a felicity which makes us regret that it should remain
unfinished.
"Here Reynolds is laid, and to tell you my mind,
He has not left a wiser or better behind.
His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand;
His manners were gentle, complying, and bland;
Still born to improve us in every part,
His pencil our faces, his manners our heart.
To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering,
When they judged without skill he was still hard of hearing:
When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff.
By flattery unspoiled--"
The friendly portrait stood unfinished on the easel; the hand of the artist
had failed! An access of a local complaint, under which he had suffered for
some time past, added to a general prostration of health, brought Goldsmith
back to town before he had well settled himself in the country. The local
complaint subsided, but was followed by a low nervous fever. He was not
aware of his critical situation, and intended to be at the club on the 25th
of March, on which occasion Charles Fox, Sir Charles Bunbury (one of the
Horneck connection), and two other new members were to be present. In the
afternoon, however, he felt so unwell as to take to his bed, and his
symptoms soon acquired sufficient force to keep him there. His malady
fluctuated for several days, and hopes were entertained of his recovery,
but they proved fallacious. He had skillful medical aid and faithful
nursing, but he would not follow the advice of his physicians, and
persisted in the use of James' powders, which he had once found beneficial,
but which were now injurious to him. His appetite was gone, his strength
failed him, but his mind remained clear, and was perhaps too active for his
frame. Anxieties and disappointments which had previously sapped his
constitution, doubtless aggravated his present complaint and rendered him
sleepless. In reply to an inquiry of his physician, he acknowledged that
his mind was ill at ease. This was his last reply; he was too weak to talk,
and in general took no notice of what was said to him. He sank at last into
a deep sleep, and it was hoped a favorable crisis had arrived. He awoke,
however, in strong convulsions, which continued without intermission until
he expired, on the fourth of April, at five o'clock in the morning; being
in the forty-sixth year of his age.
His death was a shock to the literary world, and a deep affliction to a
wide circle of intimates and friends; for with all his foibles and
peculiarities, he was fully as much beloved as he was admired. Burke, on
hearing the news, burst into tears. Sir Joshua Reynolds threw by his pencil
for the day, and grieved more than he had done in times of great family
distress. "I was abroad at the time of his death," writes Dr. M'Donnell,
the youth whom when in distress he had employed as an amanuensis, "and I
wept bitterly when the intelligence first reached me. A blank came over my
heart as if I had lost one of my nearest relatives, and was followed for
some days by a feeling of despondency. " Johnson felt the blow deeply and
gloomily. In writing some time afterward to Boswell, he observed, "Of poor
Dr. Goldsmith there is little to be told more than the papers have made
public. He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness
of mind. His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources were exhausted.
Sir Joshua is of opinion that he owed no less than two thousand pounds.
Was ever poet so trusted before? "
Among his debts were seventy-nine pounds due to his tailor, Mr. William
Filby, from whom he had received a new suit but a few days before his
death. "My father," said the younger Filby, "though a loser to that amount,
attributed no blame to Goldsmith; he had been a good customer, and had he
lived would have paid every farthing. " Others of his tradespeople evinced
the same confidence in his integrity, notwithstanding his heedlessness. Two
sister milliners in Temple Lane, who had been accustomed to deal with him,
were concerned, when told, some time before his death, of his pecuniary
embarrassments. "Oh, sir," said they to Mr. Cradock, "sooner persuade him
to let us work for him gratis than apply to any other; we are sure he will
pay us when he can. "
On the stairs of his apartment there was the lamentation of the old and
infirm, and the sobbing of women; poor objects of his charity to whom he
had never turned a deaf ear, even when struggling himself with poverty.
But there was one mourner, whose enthusiasm for his memory, could it have
been foreseen, might have soothed the bitterness of death. After the coffin
had been screwed down, a lock of his hair was requested for a lady, a
particular friend, who wished to preserve it as a remembrance. It was the
beautiful Mary Horneck--the Jessamy Bride. The coffin was opened again, and
a lock of hair cut off; which she treasured to her dying day. Poor
Goldsmith! could he have foreseen that such a memorial of him was to be
thus cherished!
One word more concerning this lady, to whom we have so often ventured to
advert. She survived almost to the present day. Hazlitt met her at
Northcote's painting-room, about twenty years since, as Mrs. Gwyn, the
widow of a General Gwyn of the army. She was at that time upward of seventy
years of age. Still, he said, she was beautiful, beautiful even in years.
After she was gone, Hazlitt remarked how handsome she still was. "I do not
know," said Northcote, "why she is so kind as to come to see me, except
that I am the last link in the chain that connects her with all those she
most esteemed when young--Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith--and remind her of
the most delightful period of her life. " "Not only so," observed Hazlitt,
"but you remember what she was at twenty; and you thus bring back to her
the triumphs of her youth--that pride of beauty, which must be the more
fondly cherished as it has no external vouchers, and lives chiefly in the
bosom of its once lovely possessor. In her, however, the Graces had
triumphed over time; she was one of Ninon de l'Enclos' people, of the last
of the immortals. I could almost fancy the shade of Goldsmith in the room,
looking round with complacency. "
The Jessamy Bride survived her sister upward of forty years, and died in
1840, within a few days of completing her eighty-eighth year. "She had gone
through all the stages of life," says Northcote, "and had lent a grace to
each. " However gayly she may have sported with the half-concealed
admiration of the poor awkward poet in the heyday of her youth and beauty,
and however much it may have been made a subject of teasing by her youthful
companions, she evidently prided herself in after years upon having been an
object of his affectionate regard; it certainly rendered her interesting
throughout life in the eyes of his admirers, and has hung a poetical wreath
above her grave.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
THE FUNERAL--THE MONUMENT--THE EPITAPH--CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the warm feeling of the moment, while the remains of the poet were
scarce cold, it was determined by his friends to honor them by a public
funeral and a tomb in Westminster Abbey. His very pall-bearers were
designated: Lord Shelburne, Lord Lowth, Sir Joshua Reynolds; the Hon. Mr.
Beauclerc, Mr. Burke, and David Garrick. This feeling cooled down, however,
when it was discovered that he died in debt, and had not left wherewithal
to pay for such expensive obsequies. Five days after his death, therefore,
at five o'clock of Saturday evening, the 9th of April, he was privately
interred in the burying-ground of the Temple Church; a few persons
attending as mourners, among whom we do not find specified any of his
peculiar and distinguished friends. The chief mourner was Sir Joshua
Reynolds' nephew, Palmer, afterward Dean of Cashel. One person, however,
from whom it was but little to be expected, attended the funeral and
evinced real sorrow on the occasion. This was Hugh Kelly, once the dramatic
rival of the deceased, and often, it is said, his anonymous assailant in
the newspapers. If he had really been guilty of this basest of literary
offenses, he was punished by the stings of remorse, for we are told that he
shed bitter tears over the grave of the man he had injured. His tardy
atonement only provoked the lash of some unknown satirist, as the following
lines will show:
"Hence Kelly, who years, without honor or shame,
Had been sticking his bodkin in Oliver's fame,
Who thought, like the Tartar, by this to inherit
His genius, his learning, simplicity, spirit;
Now sets every feature to weep o'er his fate,
And acts as a mourner to blubber in state. "
One base wretch deserves to be mentioned, the reptile Kenrick, who, after
having repeatedly slandered Goldsmith while living, had the audacity to
insult his memory when dead. The following distich is sufficient to show
his malignancy, and to hold him up to execration:
"By his own art, who justly died,
A blund'ring, artless suicide:
Share, earthworms, share, since now he's dead,
His megrim, maggot-bitten head. "
This scurrilous epitaph produced a burst of public indignation that awed
for a time even the infamous Kenrick into silence. On the other hand, the
press teemed with tributes in verse and prose to the memory of the
deceased; all evincing the mingled feeling of admiration for the author and
affection for the man.
Not long after his death the Literary Club set on foot a subscription, and
raised a fund to erect a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. It
was executed by Nollekins, and consisted simply of a bust of the poet in
profile, in high relief, in a medallion, and was placed in the area of a
pointed arch, over the south door in Poets' Corner, between the monuments
of Gay and the Duke of Argyle. Johnson furnished a Latin epitaph, which was
read at the table of Sir Joshua Reynolds, where several members of the club
and other friends of the deceased were present.
Though considered by them a
masterly composition, they thought the literary character of the poet not
defined with sufficient exactness, and they preferred that the epitaph
should be in English rather than Latin, as "the memory of so eminent an
English writer ought to be perpetuated in the language to which his works
were likely to be so lasting an ornament. " These objections were reduced to
writing, to be respectfully submitted to Johnson, but such was the awe
entertained of his frown that every one shrank from putting his name first
to the instrument; whereupon their names were written about it in a circle,
making what mutinous sailors call a Round Robin. Johnson received it half
graciously, half grimly. "He was willing," he said, "to modify the sense of
the epitaph in any manner the gentlemen pleased; _but he never would
consent to disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English
inscription_. " Seeing the names of Dr. Wharton and Edmund Burke among
the signers, "he wondered," he said, "that Joe Wharton, a scholar by
profession, should be such a fool; and should have thought that Mund Burke
would have had more sense. " The following is the epitaph as it stands
inscribed on a white marble tablet beneath the bust:
OLIVARII GOLDSMITH,
Poetae, Physici, Historici,
Qui nullum ferè scribendi genus
Non tetigit,
Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit
Sive risus essent movendi,
Sive lacrymae,
Affectuum potens ac lenis dominator:
Ingenio sublimis, vividus, versatilis,
Oratione grandis, nitidus, venustus:
Hoc monumento memoriam coluit
Sodalium amor,
Amicorum fides,
Lectorum veneratio.
Natus in Hibernia Forniae Longfordiensis,
In loco cui nomen Pallas,
Nov. xxix. MDCCXXXI. ;
Eblanse literis institutus;
Obiit Londini,
April iv. MDCCLXXIV.
The following translation is from Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson:
OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH--
A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,
Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,
And touched nothing that he did not adorn;
Of all the passions,
Whether smiles were to be moved or tears,
A powerful yet gentle master;
In genius, sublime, vivid, versatile,
In style, elevated, clear, elegant--
The love of companions,
The fidelity of friends,
And the veneration of readers,
Have by this monument honored the memory.
He was born in Ireland,
At a place called Pallas,
[In the parish] of Forney, [and county] of Longford,
On the 29th Nov. , 1731,[*]
Educated at [the University of] Dublin,
And died in London,
4th April, 1774.
[Footnote *: Incorrect. See page 12. ]
* * * * *
We shall not pretend to follow these anecdotes of the life of Goldsmith
with any critical dissertation on his writings; their merits have long
since been fully discussed, and their station in the scale of literary
merit permanently established. They have outlasted generations of works of
higher power and wider scope, and will continue to outlast succeeding
generations, for they have that magic charm of style by which works are
embalmed to perpetuity. Neither shall we attempt a regular analysis of the
character of the poet, but will indulge in a few desultory remarks in
addition to those scattered throughout the preceding chapters.
Never was the trite, because sage apothegm, that "The child is father to
the man," more fully verified than in the case of Goldsmith. He is shy,
awkward, and blundering in childhood, yet full of sensibility; he is a butt
for the jeers and jokes of his companions, but apt to surprise and confound
them by sudden and witty repartees; he is dull and stupid at his
tasks, yet an eager and intelligent devourer of the traveling tales and
campaigning stories of his half military pedagogue; he may be a dunce, but
he is already a rhymer; and his early scintillations of poetry awaken the
expectations of his friends. He seems from infancy to have been compounded
of two natures, one bright, the other blundering; or to have had fairy
gifts laid in his cradle by the "good people" who haunted his birthplace,
the old goblin mansion on the banks of the Inny.
He carries with him the wayward elfin spirit, if we may so term it,
throughout his career. His fairy gifts are of no avail at school, academy,
or college; they unfit him for close study and practical science, and
render him heedless of everything that does not address itself to his
poetical imagination and genial and festive feelings; they dispose him to
break away from restraint, to stroll about hedges, green lanes, and haunted
streams, to revel with jovial companions, or to rove the country like a
gypsy in quest of odd adventures.
As if confiding in these delusive gifts, he takes no heed of the present
nor care for the future, lays no regular and solid foundation of knowledge,
follows out no plan, adopts and discards those recommended by his friends,
at one time prepares for the ministry, next turns to the law, and then
fixes upon medicine. He repairs to Edinburgh, the great emporium of medical
science, but the fairy gifts accompany him; he idles and frolics away his
time there, imbibing only such knowledge as is agreeable to him; makes an
excursion to the poetical regions of the Highlands; and having walked the
hospitals for the customary time, sets off to ramble over the Continent, in
quest of novelty rather than knowledge. His whole tour is a poetical one.
He fancies he is playing the philosopher while he is really playing the
poet; and though professedly he attends lectures and visits foreign
universities, so deficient is he on his return, in the studies for which he
set out, that he fails in an examination as a surgeon's mate; and while
figuring as a doctor of medicine, is outvied on a point of practice by his
apothecary. Baffled in every regular pursuit, after trying in vain some of
the humbler callings of commonplace life, he is driven almost by chance to
the exercise of his pen, and here the fairy gifts come to his assistance.
For a long time, however, he seems unaware of the magic properties of that
pen; he uses it only as a makeshift until he can find a _legitimate_
means of support. He is not a learned man, and can write but meagerly and
at second-hand on learned subjects; but he has a quick convertible talent
that seizes lightly on the points of knowledge necessary to the
illustration of a theme; his writings for a time are desultory, the fruits
of what he has seen and felt, or what he has recently and hastily read; but
his gifted pen transmutes everything into gold, and his own genial nature
reflects its sunshine through his pages.
Still unaware of his powers he throws off his writings anonymously, to go
with the writings of less favored men; and it is a long time, and after a
bitter struggle with poverty and humiliation, before he acquires confidence
in his literary talent as a means of support, and begins to dream of
reputation.
From this time his pen is a wand of power in his hand, and he has only to
use it discreetly, to make it competent to all his wants. But discretion is
not a part of Goldsmith's nature; and it seems the property of these fairy
gifts to be accompanied by moods and temperaments to render their effect
precarious. The heedlessness of his early days; his disposition for social
enjoyment; his habit of throwing the present on the neck of the future,
still continue. His expenses forerun his means; he incurs debts on the
faith of what his magic pen is to produce, and then, under the pressure of
his debts, sacrifices its productions for prices far below their value. It
is a redeeming circumstance in his prodigality, that it is lavished oftener
upon others than upon himself; he gives without thought or stint, and is
the continual dupe of his benevolence and his trustfulness in human nature.
We may say of him as he says of one of his heroes, "He could not stifle the
natural impulse which he had to do good, but frequently borrowed money to
relieve the distressed; and when he knew not conveniently where to borrow,
he has been observed to shed tears as he passed through the wretched
suppliants who attended his gate. ". . . .
"His simplicity in trusting persons whom he had no previous reasons to
place confidence in, seems to be one of those lights of his character
which, while they impeach his understanding, do honor to his benevolence.
The low and the timid are ever suspicious; but a heart impressed with
honorable sentiments expects from others sympathetic sincerity. " [Footnote:
Goldsmith's Life of Nashe. ]
His heedlessness in pecuniary matters, which had rendered his life a
struggle with poverty even in the days of his obscurity, rendered the
struggle still more intense when his fairy gifts had elevated him into the
society of the wealthy and luxurious, and imposed on his simple and
generous spirit fancied obligations to a more ample and bounteous display.
"How comes it," says a recent and ingenious critic, "that in all the miry
paths of life which he had trod, no speck ever sullied the robe of his
modest and graceful muse. How amid all that love of inferior company, which
never to the last forsook him, did he keep his genius so free from every
touch of vulgarity? "
We answer that it was owing to the innate purity and goodness of his
nature; there was nothing in it that assimilated to vice and vulgarity.
Though his circumstances often compelled him to associate with the poor,
they never could betray him into companionship with the depraved. His
relish for humor and for the study of character, as we have before
observed, brought him often into convivial company of a vulgar kind; but he
discriminated between their vulgarity and their amusing qualities, or
rather wrought from the whole those familiar features of life which form
the staple of his most popular writings.
Much, too, of this intact purity of heart may be ascribed to the lessons of
his infancy under the paternal roof; to the gentle, benevolent, elevated,
unworldly maxims of his father, who "passing rich with forty pounds a
year," infused a spirit into his child which riches could not deprave nor
poverty degrade. Much of his boyhood, too, had been passed in the household
of his uncle, the amiable and generous Contarine; where he talked of
literature with the good pastor, and practiced music with his daughter, and
delighted them both by his juvenile attempts at poetry. These early
associations breathed a grace and refinement into his mind and tuned it up,
after the rough sports on the green, or the frolics at the tavern. These
led him to turn from the roaring glees of the club, to listen to the harp
of his cousin Jane; and from the rustic triumph of "throwing sledge," to a
stroll with his flute along the pastoral banks of the Inny.
The gentle spirit of his father walked with him through life, a pure and
virtuous monitor; and in all the vicissitudes of his career we find him
ever more chastened in mind by the sweet and holy recollections of the home
of his infancy.
It has been questioned whether he really had any religious feeling. Those
who raise the question have never considered well his writings; his Vicar
of Wakefield, and his pictures of the Village Pastor, present religion
under its most endearing forms, and with a feeling that could only flow
from the deep convictions of the heart. When his fair traveling companions
at Paris urged him to read the Church Service on a Sunday, he replied that
"he was not worthy to do it. " He had seen in early life the sacred offices
performed by his father and his brother, with a solemnity which had
sanctified them in his memory; how could he presume to undertake such
functions? His religion has been called in question by Johnson and by
Boswell; he certainly had not the gloomy hypochondriacal piety of the one,
nor the babbling mouth-piety of the other; but the spirit of Christian
charity breathed forth in his writings and illustrated in his conduct give
us reason to believe he had the indwelling religion of the soul.
We have made sufficient comments in the preceding chapters on his conduct
in elevated circles of literature and fashion. The fairy gifts which took
him there were not accompanied by the gifts and graces necessary to sustain
him in that artificial sphere. He can neither play the learned sage with
Johnson, nor the fine gentleman with Beauclerc, though he has a mind
replete with wisdom and natural shrewdness, and a spirit free from
vulgarity. The blunders of a fertile but hurried intellect, and the awkward
display of the student assuming the man of fashion, fix on him a character
for absurdity and vanity which, like the charge of lunacy, it is hard to
disprove, however weak the grounds of the charge and strong the facts in
opposition to it.
In truth, he is never truly in his place in these learned and fashionable
circles, which talk and live for display. It is not the kind of society he
craves. His heart yearns for domestic life; it craves familiar, confiding
intercourse, family firesides, the guileless and happy company of children;
these bring out the heartiest and sweetest sympathies of his nature.
"Had it been his fate," says the critic we have already quoted, "to meet a
woman who could have loved him, despite his faults, and respected him
despite his foibles, we cannot but think that his life and his genius would
have been much more harmonious; his desultory affections would have been
concentered, his craving self-love appeased, his pursuits more settled, his
character more solid. A nature like Goldsmith's, so affectionate, so
confiding--so susceptible to simple, innocent enjoyments--so dependent on
others for the sunshine of existence, does not flower if deprived of the
atmosphere of home. "
The cravings of his heart in this respect are evident, we think, throughout
his career; and if we have dwelt with more significancy than others upon
his intercourse with the beautiful Horneck family, it is because we fancied
we could detect, amid his playful attentions to one of its members, a
lurking sentiment of tenderness, kept down by conscious poverty and a
humiliating idea of personal defects. A hopeless feeling of this kind--the
last a man would communicate to his friends--might account for much of that
fitfulness of conduct, and that gathering melancholy, remarked, but not
comprehended by his associates, during the last year or two of his life;
and may have been one of the troubles of the mind which aggravated his last
illness, and only terminated with his death.
We shall conclude these desultory remarks with a few which have been used
by us on a former occasion. From the general tone of Goldsmith's biography,
it is evident that his faults, at the worst, were but negative, while his
merits were great and decided. He was no one's enemy but his own; his
errors, in the main, inflicted evil on none but himself, and were so
blended with humorous, and even affecting circumstances, as to disarm anger
and conciliate kindness. Where eminent talent is united to spotless virtue,
we are awed and dazzled into admiration, but our admiration is apt to be
cold and reverential; while there is something in the harmless infirmities
of a good and great, but erring individual, that pleads touchingly to our
nature; and we turn more kindly toward the object of our idolatry, when we
find that, like ourselves, he is mortal and is frail. The epithet so often
heard, and in such kindly tones, of "Poor Goldsmith," speaks volumes. Few
who consider the real compound of admirable and whimsical qualities which
form his character would wish to prune away its eccentricities, trim its
grotesque luxuriance, and clip it down to the decent formalities of rigid
virtue. "Let not his frailties be remembered," said Johnson; "he was a very
great man. " But, for our part, we rather say "Let them be remembered,"
since their tendency is to endear; and we question whether he himself would
not feel gratified in hearing his reader, after dwelling with admiration on
the proofs of his greatness, close the volume with the kind-hearted phrase,
so fondly and familiarly ejaculated, of "POOR GOLDSMITH. "
THE COMPLETE
POETICAL WORKS
OF
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
'EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES'
BY
AUSTIN DOBSON
HON. LL. D. EDIN.
PREFATORY NOTE
THIS volume is a reprint, extended and revised, of the 'Selected Poems'
of Goldsmith issued by the Clarendon Press in 1887. It is 'extended,'
because it now contains the whole of Goldsmith's poetry: it is 'revised'
because, besides the supplementary text, a good deal has been added in
the way of annotation and illustration. In other words, the book has
been substantially enlarged. Of the new editorial material, the bulk has
been collected at odd times during the last twenty years; but fresh
Goldsmith facts are growing rare. I hope I have acknowledged obligation
wherever it has been incurred; I trust also, for the sake of those who
come after me, that something of my own will be found to have been
contributed to the literature of the subject.
AUSTIN DOBSON.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chronology of Goldsmith's Life and Poems
POEMS
The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society
The Deserted Village
Prologue of Laberius
On a Beautiful Youth struck Blind with Lightning
The Gift. To Iris, in Bow Street
The Logicians Refuted
A Sonnet
Stanzas on the Taking of Quebec
An Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize
Description of an Author's Bedchamber
On seeing Mrs. *** perform in the Character of ****
On the Death of the Right Hon. ***
An Epigram. Addressed to the Gentlemen reflected on
in 'The Rosciad', a Poem, by the Author
To G. C. and R. L
Translation of a South American Ode
The Double Transformation. A Tale
A New Simile, in the Manner of Swift
Edwin and Angelina
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
Song ('When Lovely Woman,' &c. )
Epilogue to 'The Good Natur'd Man'
Epilogue to 'The Sister'
Prologue to 'Zobeide'
Threnodia Augustalis: Sacred to the Memory of Her
Late Royal Highness the Princess Dowager
of Wales
Song ('Let School-masters,' &c. )
Epilogue to 'She Stoops to Conquer'
Retaliation
Song ('Ah, me! when shall I marry me? ')
Translation ('Chaste are their instincts')
The Haunch of Venison
Epitaph on Thomas Parnell
The Clown's Reply
Epitaph on Edward Purdon
Epilogue for Lee Lewes
Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (1)
Epilogue written for 'She Stoops to Conquer' (2)
The Captivity. An Oratorio
Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner
Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury
Vida's Game of Chess
NOTES
Introduction to the Notes
Editions of the Poems
The Traveller
The Deserted Village
Prologue of Laberius
On a Beautiful Youth struck Blind with Lightning
The Gift
The Logicians Refuted
A Sonnet
Stanzas on the Taking of Quebec
An Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize
Description of an Author's Bedchamber
On seeing Mrs. *** perform in the Character of ****
On the Death of the Right Hon. ***
An Epigram
To G. C. and R. L.
Translation of a South American Ode
The Double Transformation
A New Simile
Edwin and Angelina
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
Song (from 'The Vicar of Wakefield')
Epilogue ('The Good Natur'd Man')
Epilogue ('The Sister')
Prologue ('Zobeide')
Threnodia Augustalis
Song (from 'She Stoops to Conquer')
Epilogue ('She Stoops to Conquer')
Retaliation
Song intended for 'She Stoops to Conquer'
Translation
The Haunch of Venison
Epitaph on Thomas Parnell
The Clown's Reply
Epitaph on Edward Purdon
Epilogue for Lee Lewes's Benefit
Epilogue ('She Stoops to Conquer') (1)
Epilogue ('She Stoops to Conquer') (2)
The Captivity
Verses in Reply to an Invitation to Dinner
Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury
Vida's Game of Chess
APPENDIXES
Portraits of Goldsmith
Descriptions of Newell's Views of Lissoy, &c
The Epithet 'Sentimental'
Fragments of Translations, &c. , by Goldsmith
Goldsmith on Poetry under Anne and George the First
Criticisms from Goldsmith's
'Beauties of English Poesy'
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
OLIVER GOLDSMITH. From Joseph Marchi's mezzotint of 1770
after the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. . . . . . Frontispiece.
PANE OF GLASS with Goldsmith's autograph signature, dated
March, 1746, now at Trinity College, Dublin. . . . . To face p. xi
VIGNETTE TO THE TRAVELLER. Drawn by Samuel Wale, and
engraved by Charles Grignion . . . . . . . . . . . . To face p. 3
HEADPIECE TO THE TRAVELLER. Engraved on wood by Charlton
Nesbit for Bulmer's 'Poems of Goldsmith and
Parnell', 1795 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 5
THE TRAVELLER. From a design by Richard Westall, R. A. ,
engraved on wood by Thomas Bewick for Bulmer's
'Poems of Goldsmith and Parnell', 1795 . . . . . . . To face p. 8
VIGNETTE TO THE DESERTED VILLAGE, 1770. Drawn and
engraved by Isaac Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To face p. 21
HEADPIECE TO THE DESERTED VILLAGE. Engraved on wood
by Charlton Nesbit for Bulmer's 'Poems of
Goldsmith and Parnell', 1795 . . . . . . . . .
