No More Learning

A. degree
on 27 February 1749, and quitted the university without
regret, leaving behind him a scratched signature on a window
pane (still preserved), an old lexicon scored with 'promises to
pay' and a reputation for supplementing his scanty means by the
ballads (unluckily not preserved) which he was accustomed to
write and afterwards sell for five shillings a head at the Reindeer
in Mountrath court, stealing out at nightfall-80 runs the
tradition—to snatch the fearful joy’ of hearing them sung. It
must have been the memory of these things which, years after,
at Sir William Chambers's, made him fling down his cards, and
rush hurriedly into the street to succour a poor ballad-woman,
who had apparently, like Rubini, les larmes dans la voix.
What was to happen next? For a Goldsmith of the Goldsmiths,
there was no career but the church; and he was too young to be
ordained. Thereupon ensued an easy, irresponsible time, which
the new B. A. spent very much to his own satisfaction. He was
supposed to be qualifying for orders; but he had never any great
leaning that way. “To be obliged to wear a long wig, when he
liked a short one, or a black coat, when he generally dressed in
brown,' observes one of his characters in The Citizen of the World,
was 'a restraint upon his liberty. Hence, as his biographer Prior
'
sagaciously says, 'there is reason to believe that at this time he
followed no systematic plan of study. On the contrary, he passed
his time wandering, like Addison's Will Wimble, from one relative
to another, fishing and otter-hunting in the isleted river Inny,
playing the flute to his cousin Jane Contarine's harpsichord, or
presiding at the ‘free and easys' held periodically at George
Conway's inn at Ballymahon, where, for the benefit of posterity,
he doubtless made acquaintance with Jack Slang the horse-doctor,
Dick Muggins the exciseman and that other genteel and punctilious
humourist who never 'danced his bear' except to Arne’s ‘Water
writ:parted? or the minuet in Handel's Ariadne. But these 'violent
delights' could have only one sequel. When, in 1751, he presented
himself to Dr Synge, bishop of Elphin, for ordination, he was
rejected. Whether his college reputation had preceded him ;
whether, as on a later occasion, he was found' not qualified,' or
6


## p. 200 (#226) ############################################

200
Oliver Goldsmith
whether (as legend has it) he pushed his aversion from clerical
costume so far as to appear in flaming scarlet smallclothes—these
questions are still debated. That another calling must be chosen
was the only certain outcome of this mishap. He first turned to
the next refuge of lettered unemployment, tuition. Having, in
this way, accumulated some thirty pounds, he bought a horse, and
once more started for America. Before six weeks were over,
he had returned penniless, on an animal only fit for the knacker's
yard, and seemed naïvely surprised that his friends were not
rejoiced to see him. Law was next thought of; and, to this end,
his uncle Contarine equipped him with fifty pounds. But he was
cozened by a sharper on his way to London, and once more came
back-in bitter self-abasement. In 1752, his longsuffering uncle
for the last time fitted him out, this time to study physic at
Edinburgh, which place, wonderful to relate, he safely reached.
But he never saw Ireland, or his kind relative, again.
After two years' stay in the Scottish capital, where more
memories survive of his social success than of his studies, he took
his departure for Leyden, nominally to substitute the lectures
of Albinus for the lectures of Monro. At Leyden, he arrived in
1754, not without some picturesque and, possibly, romanced
adventures related in a letter to Contarine. The names of Gaubius
and other Batavian professors figure glibly and sonorously in his
future pages ; but that he had much experimental knowledge of
their instruction is doubtful. His name is not enrolled as a
*Stud. Litt. ' in the Album Academicum of Leyden university, nor
is it known where he received that 'commission to slay' which
justified him in signing himself 'M. B. ' It was certainly not at
Padua ! ; and enquiries at Leyden and Louvain were made by
Prior without success. But the Louvain records were destroyed
in the revolutionary wars. That, however, his stay at Leyden
was neither prosperous nor prolonged is plain. He fell again
among thieves; and, finally, like Holberg, or that earlier 'Peregrine
of Odcombe,' Thomas Coryat of the Crudities, set out to make the
grand tour on foot. 'Haud inexpertus loquor,' he wrote, later, in
praising this mode of locomotion; though, on second thoughts, he
suppressed the quotation as an undignified admission. He went,
first, to Flanders; then passed to France, Germany, Switzerland
and Italy, supporting himself, much as George Primrose does in
The Vicar of Wakefield, by playing the flute, and by occasional
disputations at convents or universities. 'Sir,' said Boswell to
The Athenaeum, 21 July 1894.
a
6


## p. 201 (#227) ############################################

6
The Parting of the Ways 201
Johnson (who seems to have sustained the pun without blenching),
‘he disputed his passage through Europe. At some period of
'
his wanderings he must have sketched a part of The Traveller,
specimens of which he sent from Switzerland to his brother Henry.
After a year's wandering, he landed at Dover on 1 February 1756,
‘his whole stock of cash,' says an early biographer, 'amounting
to no more than a few half-pence. By this time, he was seven-
and-twenty.
His vocation was still as visionary as were his means of subsis-
tence. He is supposed to have tried strolling, and was certainly
anxious to play 'Scrub' in later years. For a season, he was an
apothecary's assistant on Fish street hill. Hence, with some as-
sistance from an Edinburgh friend, Dr Sleigh, he 'proceeded' a
poor physician in the Bankside, Southwark—the region afterwards
remembered in An Elegy on Mrs Mary Blaize. He is next found
as corrector of the press to Richardson, at Salisbury court. Then,
drifting insensibly towards literature, to which he seems never to
have intentionally shaped his course, he is (again like his own George
Primrose) an usher at the 'classical Academy of Dr Milner of
Peckham. He had already submitted a manuscript tragedy to the
author of Clarissa ; and, at Milner's table, he encountered the
bookseller Ralph Griffiths, proprietor of The Monthly Review.
Struck by some remark on the part of Milner's latest assistant,
and seeking for new blood to aid him in his campaign against
Hamilton's Critical Review, Griffiths asked Goldsmith whether
he could furnish some ‘specimens of criticism. An arrangement
followed under which, released from the drudgery of Peckham,
Goldsmith was to receive, with bed and board, a salary which
Percy calls ‘handsome,' Prior 'adequate' and Forster (small. '
For this, he was to labour daily from nine till two (or later) on
copy-of-all-work for his master's magazine.
This, in effect, was Goldsmith's turning-point; and he had
reached it by accident rather than design. Divinity, law, physic-
he had tried them all; but, at letters, he had never aimed With
his duties at the Sign of the Dunciad,' in Paternoster row, began
his definite bondage to the 'antiqua Mater of Grub Street'; and
we may pause for a moment to examine his qualifications for his
difficult career. They were more considerable than one would
imagine from his vagrant, aimless past. He was a fair classical
scholar, more advanced than might be supposed from his own
modest admission to Malone, that he could 'turn an ode of Horace
into English better than any of them'; and, as that sound critic
6


## p. 202 (#228) ############################################

202
Oliver Goldsmith
6
and Goldsmithian, the late Sidney Irwin, remarked, it is not
necessary to make him responsible for the graceless Greek of
Mr Ephraim Jenkinson. In English poetry, he was far seen,
especially in Dryden, Swift, Prior, Johnson, Pope and Gay. He
had a good knowledge of Shakespeare; and was familiar with
the comic dramatists, particularly his compatriot Farquhar.
French he had acquired before he left Ireland, and he had
closely studied Molière, La Fontaine and the different collections
of ana. For Voltaire, he had a sincere admiration; and, whether
he actually met him abroad or not, it is probable his own native
style, clear and perspicuous as it was from the first, had been
developed and perfected by the example of the wonderful writer
by whom the adjective was regarded as the enemy of the noun.
Finally, he had enjoyed considerable experience of humanity,
though mostly in the rough ; and, albeit his standpoint as a
pedestrian had, of necessity, limited his horizon, he had 'observed
the face of the countries through which he had travelled, making
his own deductions. On what he had seen, he had reflected, and,
when he sat down to the 'desk’s dead wood’ in Paternoster row,
his initial equipment as a critic, apart from his individual genius,
must have been superior, in variety and extent, at all events, to
that of most of the literary gentlemen, not exclusively hacks,
who did Griffiths's notices in The Monthly Review.
Even in his first paper, on The Mythology of the Celtes, by
Mallet, the translator of the Edda, he opened with a statement
which must have been out of the jog-trot of the Dunciad traditions.
“The learned on this side the Alps,' he said, 'have long laboured in the
Antiquities of Greece and Rome, but almost totally neglected their own; like
Conquerors who, while they have made inroads into the territories of their
neighbours, have left their own natural dominions to desolation. '
It would be too much to trace the Reliques of English Poetry
to this utterance; but (as Forster says) 'it is wonderful what
a word in season from a man of genius may do, even when the
genius is hireling and obscure and only labouring for the bread it
eats. ' Meanwhile, the specimen review 'from the gentleman who
signs, D,' although printed with certain omissions, secured Gold-
smith's entry to Griffiths's periodical, and he criticised some notable
books—Home's Douglas, Burke On the Sublime, Gray's Odes, the
Connoisseur, Smollett's History_titles which at least prove that,
utility man as he was, his competence was recognised from the
first. The review of Gray, whose remoteness and 'obscurity' he
.
regretted, and whom he advised to take counsel of Isocrates and
6


## p. 203 (#229) ############################################

,
Marteilhe's Memoirs
203
'study the people,' was, nevertheless, the last of his contributions
to The Monthly Review. Whether the fault lay in his own restless
nature, or whether he resented the vexatious editing of his work
by the bookseller and his wife, the fact remains that, with
September 1757, Goldsmith's permanent connection with Griffiths
came to a close ; and, for the next few months, he subsisted by
contributing to The Literary Magazine and by other miscellaneous
practice of the pen.
At this point, however, emerges his first prolonged literary
effort, the remarkable rendering of the Memoirs of Jean Marteilhe
of Bergerac, 'a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France
for his Religion, which was published in February 1758. This
translation, perhaps because it has been sometimes confused with
that issued by the Religious Tract Society, has never received the
attention it deserves. It is an exceedingly free and racy version
of one of the most authentic records of the miseries ensuing on the
revocation of the edict of Nantes; and Goldsmith, drudge as he was
supposed to be, has treated his theme sympathetically. He may,
indeed, have actually seen Marteilhe in Holland; but it is more
reasonable to suppose that he was attracted to the subject by the
advertisement, in The Monthly Review for May 1757, of the
French original. The book is full of interest; and, as the fight
of The Nightingale with the galleys, and the episode of Goujon,
the young cadet of the Aubusson regiment, prove, by no means
deficient in moving and romantic incident. Why, on this occasion,
Goldsmith borrowed as his pseudonym the name of an old college-
fellow, James Willington, it is idle to enquire. In his signed
receipt, still extant, to Edward Dilly, for a third share in the
volumes, they are expressly described as “my translation, and it
is useful to note that the mode of sale, as will hereafter be seen,
is exactly that subsequently adopted for the sale of The Vicar
of Wakefield.
Anonymous or pseudonymous, Marteilhe's Memoirs had little
effect on Goldsmith’s fortunes; and the twenty pounds he received
for the MS in January 1758, must have been quickly spent, for
he was shortly at Peckham again, vaguely hoping that his old
master would procure him a medical appointment on a foreign
station. It was, no doubt, to obtain funds for his outfit that he
began to plan his next book, An Enquiry into the Present State
of Polite Learning in Europe, for we find him in this year
soliciting subscriptions from his friends in Ireland. When, at
last, the nomination arrived, it was merely that of physician to


## p. 204 (#230) ############################################

204
Oliver Goldsmith
a Coromandel factory. What was worse, for some obscure reason,
it came to nothing; and his next move was to present himself
at Surgeons' hall—like Smollett's Roderick Random-as a ship's
hospital mate, with the result that, in December, he was rejected
as ‘not qualified. ' To put the seal on his embarrassments, this new
effort involved him in fresh difficulties with his former employer,
Griffiths, who had helped him to appear in decent guise before
the examiners - difficulties from which he only extricated himself
with much humiliation by engaging to write a life of Voltaire.
We next find him domiciled at 12 Green Arbour court, Little
Old Bailey', where, in March 1759, Percy, who had recently made
his acquaintance through Grainger of The Sugar Cane, one of the
staff of The Monthly Review, paid him a visit. He discovered him
in a miserable room, correcting the proofs of his Enquiry, which
appeared in the following month. For a small duodecimo of two
hundred pages, it is, beyond doubt, ambitiously labelled. The
field was too wide for so brief a survey; and, although the author
professed that his sketch was mostly 'taken upon the spot,' it was
obvious that he was imperfectly equipped for his task. What he
had himself seen he described freshly and forcibly; and what
he knew of the conditions of letters in England he depicted with
feeling. He might talk largely of the learning of 'Luitprandus’ and
the 'philological performances' of Constantinus Afer; but what
touched him more nearly was the mercantile avidity and sordid
standards of the London bookseller, the hungry rancour of the
venal writers in his pay, the poverty of the poets, the slow
rewards of genius. Perhaps the most interesting features of the
Enquiry are, primarily, that it is Goldsmith's earliest original
work; and, next, that it is wholly free from that empty orotundity,
that didactic stiffness of wisdom,' which his French models had
led him to regard as the crying sin of his English contemporaries.
To be 'dull and dronish,' he held, was “an encroachment on the
prerogative of a folio. ' 'The most diminutive son of fame, or of
famine, has his we and his us, his firstlys and his secondlys as
methodical as if bound in cowhide, and closed with clasps of brass. '
On the whole, the little book was well received, notwithstanding its
censure of the two leading Reviews, and the fact that the chapter
"Of the Stage,' enforcing, as it did, Ralph's earlier Case of Authors
by Profession, gave Garrick lasting offence--a circumstance to
1 These premises were subsequently occupied by Smith, Elder & Co. as The
Cornhill Magazine printing office, to which Thackeray sent his proofs. (Cf. Round.
about Paper, 'De Finibus,' August 1862, at end. )


## p. 205 (#231) ############################################

6
>
The Bee
205
which may be traced not only some of Goldsmith's later dramatic
difficulties, but that popular 'poor Poll' couplet of which the
portable directness rather than the truth has done much wrong
to Goldsmith's reputation. To be as easily remembered as a
limerick is no small help to a malicious epigram.
At this date, beyond a few lines dated 'Edinburgh, 1753,' the
instalment of The Traveller sent to Henry Goldsmith from Switzer-
land, and the Description of an Author's Bedchamber included
in another letter to the same address, little had been heard of
Goldsmith's verse, although he had written vaguely of himself
as a 'poet. ' In the Enquiry, however, he published his first
metrical effort, a translation of a Latin prologue in that recondite
Macrobius with a quotation from whom, after an uncommunicative
silence, Johnson electrified the company on his first arrival at
Oxford. In the little periodical called The Bee, with which
Goldsmith followed up the Enquiry, he included several rimed
contributions. Of these, only one, some 'topical stanzas, On the
Death of Wolfe, is absolutely original. But the rest anticipate
some of his later excellences—and personal opinions. In the
Elegy on Mrs Mary Blaize, he laughs at the fashion, set by Gray,
of funereal verse, and, in the bright little quatrains entitled The
Gift, successfully reproduces the levity of Prior. But, what is
more, he begins to exhibit his powers as a critic and essayist,
to write character sketches in the vein of Addison and Steele,
to reveal his abilities as a stage critic and censor of manners.
One of the papers, A City Night-Piece, still remains a most
touching comment on the shame of cities; another, the Lucianic
reverie known as The Fame Machine (that is, 'coach'), in which
Johnson, rejected by Jehu as a passenger for his Dictionary, is
accepted on the strength of his Rambler, may have served to
introduce him to the great man who, ever after, loved him with
a growling but genuine affection. The Bee, though brief-lived,
with similar things in The Busy Body and The Lady's Magazine,
also brought him to the notice of some others, who, pecuniarily,
were more important than Johnson. Smollett enlisted him for
the new venture, The British Magazine, and bustling John
Newbery of St Paul's churchyard, for a new paper, The Public
Ledger.
For Smollett, besides a number of minor efforts, Goldsmith
wrote two of his best essays, A Reverie in the Boar's Head Tavern
at Eastcheap, and the semi-autobiographic Adventures of a
Strolling Player; for Newbery, the Chinese Letters, afterwards
>


## p. 206 (#232) ############################################

206
Oliver Goldsmith
a
collected as The Citizen of the World. This production was his first
permanent success. With its assumed orientalism, as with what
it borrows from Montesquieu or his imitators, we can dispense,
although it may be noted that a summary of the vices of the con-
temporary novel, long supposed to be Goldsmith's own, is a literal
transcript of Du Halde. What is most enduring in the corre-
spondence of Lien Chi Altangi is the fuller revelation, already
begun in The Bee, of Goldsmith as a critic, a humourist and
a social historiographer. It is Goldsmith on quacks and con-
noisseurs, on travellers' tales and funeral pomp, on mad dogs, on
letters and the theatre, on such graver themes as the penal laws
and public morality, to whom we turn most eagerly now. And
of even greater interest than their good sense and good humour,
their graphic touches and kindly shrewdness, is the evidence which
these passages afford of the coming creator of Dr Primrose and
Tony Lumpkin. In the admirable portrait of 'the Man in Black,'
with his reluctant benevolence and his Goldsmith family traits,
there is a foretaste of some of the attractive peculiarities of the
vicar of Wakefield, while, in the picture of the pinched and
tarnished little beau, with his parrot chatter about the countess
of All-Night and the duke of Piccadilly, set to the forlorn burden
of 'Lend me Half-a-Crown,' he adds a character sketch, however
lightly touched, to that imperishable and, happily, inalienable
gallery which contains the finished full-lengths of Parson Adams
and Squire Western, of Matthew Bramble and ‘My Uncle Toby. '
The last Chinese letter appeared on 14 August 1761, and,
in May of the following year, the collection was issued in two
volumes as The Citizen of the World, a phrase first used in Letter
xx, and, perhaps, suggested by Bacon's Essays (no. XIII). At this
date, Goldsmith had moved from the Little Old Bailey to 6 Wine
Office court, Fleet street, where, on 31 May, he had been visited by
Johnson. He had been editing The Lady's Magazine, in which
appeared the Memoirs of Voltaire composed by him for Griffiths.
He wrote a pamphlet on the popular imposture, the Cock lane
ghost, and he compiled or revised A History of Mecklenburgh,
the native country of king George III's consort. He published an
anecdotical Life of Richard Nash, the fantastic old king of Bath,
and seven volumes of Plutarch's Lives. More important than these
activities, however, was the preparation of The Vicar of Wakefield,
on which, according to Miss Gaussen', he was engaged as early as
June 1761. Internal evidence shows that the book must have
Percy : Prelate and Poet, 1908, p. 144.
1


## p. 207 (#233) ############################################

The Traveller
207
6
a
been written in 1761-2; and it is certain that a third share of it
was purchased in October 1762 by Benjamin Collins of Salisbury,
who afterwards printed it for Newbery? It is to this date that
must probably be referred the sale of the MS familiar to Boswell's
readers, which, in that case, took place at Wine Office court, where
the author would be close to Johnson's chambers in Inner Temple
lane, on the opposite side of Fleet street. But, for obscure reasons,
The Vicar was not issued until four years later, at which date it
will be convenient to return to it.
Meanwhile, alternating incessant labour with fitful escapes to
* Bath or Tunbridge to careen,' and occasional residence at Islington,
Goldsmith continued in bondage to 'book-building. ' In 1764, he
became one of the original members of the famous (and still existing)
Club, afterwards known as 'The Literary Club,' a proof of the
eminence to which he had attained with the literati. This brought
him at once into relations with Burke, Reynolds, Beauclerk, Langton
and others of the Johnson circle. His next important work, The
History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his
Son, published in June, was, as had no doubt been intended, long
attributed to Chesterfield and other patrician pens. Later, too, in
the same year, Christopher Smart's Hannah moved him to the com-
position of The Captivity, an oratorio never set to music. Then,
after the slow growth of months, was issued, on 19 December
1764, another of the efforts for his own hand with which he had
diversified his hackwork-the poem entitled The Traveller; or, a
Prospect of Society.
In a spirit of independence which distinguishes this per-
formance from its author's workaday output, The Traveller was
dedicated to his brother, Henry Goldsmith, to whom the first sketch
had been forwarded from abroad, and who, in Goldsmith's words,
'despising Fame and Fortune, had retired early to Happiness and
Obscurity, with an income of forty pounds a year'-the actual
value of the curacy of Kilkenny West. The dedication further
accentuates that distaste for blank verse which Goldsmith had
already manifested in An Enquiry, as well as his antipathy, also
revealed in The Citizen of the World, to the hectoring satires of
Churchill; while the general purpose of the poem, anticipated by a
passage in the forty-third letter of Lien Chi Altangi, is stated in
the final words :
I have endeavoured to show, that there may be equal happiness in states, that
are differently governed from our own, that every state has a particular
1 This matter is discussed more fully in the bibliography.


## p. 208 (#234) ############################################

208
Oliver Goldsmith
principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a
mischievous excess.
Whether these postulates of the philosophic Wanderer'-as
Johnson would have called him-are unanswerable or not matters
little to us now. The poetry has outlived the purpose. What
remains in Goldsmith's couplets is the beauty of the descriptive
passages, the 'curious' simplicity of the language, the sweetness
and finish of the verse. Where, in his immediate predecessors, are
we to find the tender charm of such lines as
6
Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,
My heart untravell’d fondly turns to thee;
Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain,
And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.
But me, not destin'd such delights to share,
My prime of life in wand'ring spent and care,
Impelld, with steps unceasing, to pursue
Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view;
That, like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies;
My fortune leads to traverse realms alone,
And find no spot of all the world my own.
It is characteristic both of Goldsmith, and of the mosaic of
memories which the poetic theories of his day made legitimate,
that, even in these few lines, there are happy recollections, and
recollections, moreover, that he had already employed in prose.
The Traveller was an immediate and enduring success; and
Newbery, so far as can be ascertained, gave Goldsmith £21 for it.
Second, third and fourth editions quickly followed until, in 1774,
the
year
of the author's death, a ninth was reached. Johnson, who
contributed nine of the lines, declared it to be the best poem since
the death of Pope, a verdict which, without disparagement to
Goldsmith, may also be accepted as evidence of the great man's
lack of sympathy with Gray, whose Elegy had appeared in the
interval. Perhaps the most marked result of The Traveller was
to draw attention to 'Oliver Goldsmith, M. B. ,' whose name, for the
first time, appeared on the title-page of Newbery's thin eighteen-
penny quarto. People began to enquire for his earlier works, and
thereupon came a volume of Essays by Mr Goldsmith, which
comprised some of the best of his contributions to The Bee, The
Public Ledger and the rest, together with some fresh specimens
of verse, The Double Transformation and A new Simile. This
was in June 1765, after which it seems to have occurred to the
joint proprietors of The Vicar of Wakefield, that the fitting moment


## p. 209 (#235) ############################################

The Vicar of Wakefield
209
had then arrived for the production of what they apparently
regarded as their bad bargain. The novel was accordingly
printed at Salisbury by Collins for Francis Newbery, John
Newbery's nephew, and it was published on 27 March 1766, in
two duodecimo volumes.
There is no reason for supposing that there were any material
alterations in the MS which, in October 1762, had been sold by
Johnson. 'Had I made it ever so perfect or correct,' said Goldsmith
to Dr Farr (as reported in the Percy Memoir), 'I should not have
had a shilling more'; and the slight modifications in the second
edition prove nothing to the contrary. But it is demonstrable
that there was one addition of importance, the ballad The Hermit
or Edwin and Angelina, which had only been written, in or before
1765, for the amusement of the countess of Northumberland, for
whom, in that year, it was privately printed. It was probably
added to fill up chapter VIII, where, perhaps, a blank had been
left for it, a conjecture which is supported by the fact that other
lacunae have been suspected. But these purely bibliographical
considerations have little relation to the real unity of the book,
which seems to follow naturally on the character sketches of The
Citizen of the World, to the composition of which it succeeded.
In The Citizen, there is naturally more of the essayist than of the
novelist; in The Vicar, more of the novelist than of the essayist.
But the strong point in each is Goldsmith himself—Goldsmith's
own thoughts and Goldsmith's own experiences. Squire Thornhill
might have been studied in the pit at Drury lane, and even
Mr Burchell conceivably evolved from any record of remarkable
eccentrics. But the Primrose family must have come straight from
Goldsmith's heart, from his wistful memories of his father and his
brother Henry and his kind uncle Contarine and all that half-
forgotten family group at Lissoy, who, in the closing words of his
first chapter were 'all equally generous, credulous, simple, and
inoffensive. ' He himself was his own 'Philosophic Vagabond
pursuing Novelty, but losing Content,' as does George Primrose
in chapter xx. One may smile at the artless inconsistencies of
the plot, the lapses of the fable, the presence in the narrative of
such makeweights as poetry, tales, political discourses and a
sermon; but the author's genius and individuality rise superior to
everything, and the little group of the Wakefield family are now
veritable citizens of the world. Only when some wholly new
form has displaced or dispossessed the English novel will the Doctor
and Mrs Primrose, Olivia and Sophia, Moses (with the green
14
L. L. X.
CH. IX.


## p. 210 (#236) ############################################

2 IO
Oliver Goldsmith
spectacles) and the Miss Flamboroughs (with their red topknots)
cease to linger on the lips of men.
It is a grave mistake, however, to suppose that this unique
masterpiece, which still sells vigorously today, sold vigorously in
1766—at all events in the authorised issues. From the publisher's
accounts, it is now known with certainty that, when the fourth
edition of 1770 went to press, there was still a debt against the
book. The fourth edition ran out slowly, and was not exhausted
until April 1774, when a fifth edition was advertised. By this time,
Collins had parted with his unremunerative share for the modest
sum of £5. 58. , and Goldsmith himself was dying or dead. These
facts, which may be studied in detail in Charles Welsh's life of John
Newbery, rest upon expert investigations, and are incontrovertible.
They, consequently, serve as a complete answer to all who, in this
respect, make lamentation over the lack of generosity shown by
Goldsmith's first publishers. How could they give him a bonus,
when, after nine years, they were only beginning to make a profit?
They had paid what, in those days, was a fair price for the
manuscript of a two volume novel by a comparatively unknown
man; and, notwithstanding the vogue of his subsequent Traveller,
the sale did not contradict their expectations. That, only as time
,
went on, the book gradually detached itself from the rubbish of
contemporary fiction, and, ultimately, emerged triumphantly as a
cosmopolitan masterpiece—is its author's misfortune, but cannot
be laid at the door of Collins, Newbery and Co. Johnson, who
managed the sale of the manuscript, did not think it would
have much success; they, who bought it, did not think so either,
and the immediate event justified their belief. Goldsmith's appeal
was not to his contemporaries, but to that posterity on whose fund
of prospective praise he had ironically drawn a bill in the preface
to his Essays of 1765. In the case of The Vicar, the appeal has
been amply honoured; but, as its author foresaw, without being
'very serviceable' to himself.
Meanwhile, he went on with a fresh course of that compilation
which paid better than masterpieces. He edited Poems for Young
Ladies and Beauties of English Poesy; he wrote An English
Grammar; he translated A History of Philosophy. But, towards
the close of 1766, his larger ambitions again began to bestir them-
selves, and, this time, in the direction of the stage, with all its
prospects of payment at sight. Already, we have seen, he had
essayed a tragedy, which, if it were based or modelled on his
favourite Voltaire, was, probably, no great loss. His real vocation


## p. 211 (#237) ############################################

The Good-Natur'd Man
2II
>
>
was comedy; and, on comedy, his ideas were formed, having been,
in great measure, expressed in the Enquiry and in other of his
earlier writings. He held that comic art involved comic situations;
he deplored the substitution for humour and character of delicate
distresses' and superfine emotion; and he heartily despised the
finicking, newfangled variation of the French drame sérieux which,
under the name of 'genteel' or 'sentimental'comedy, had gradually
gained ground in England.
At this moment, its advocates were
active and powerful, while the defenders of the old order were few
and feeble. But, in 1766, The Clandestine Marriage of Garrick and
Colman seemed to encourage some stronger counterblast to the
lachrymose craze; and Goldsmith began slowly to put together
a piece on the approved method of Vanbrugh and Farquhar,
tempered freely with his own gentler humour and wider humanity.
He worked on his Good-Natur'd Man diligently at intervals during
1766, and, in the following year, it was completed. Its literary
merits, as might be expected, were far above the average ; it
contained two original characters, the pessimist Croaker and the
pretender Lofty; and, following the precedent of Fielding, it
borrowed the material of one of its most effective scenes from
those 'absurdities of the vulgar' which its author held to be
infinitely more diverting than the affected vagaries of so-called
high life. The next thing was to get it acted.
This was no easy matter, for it had to go through what Goldsmith
had himself termed 'a process truly chymical. ' It had to be tried
in the manager's fire, strained through a licenser, and purified in
the Review, or the newspaper of the day. ' And he had said more
indiscreet things than these. He had condemned the despotism
of the monarchs of the stage, deplored the over-prominence of
that ‘histrionic Daemon,' the actor, and attacked the cheeseparing
policy of vamping up old pieces to save the expense of `authors'
nights. ' All these things were highly unpalatable to Garrick; but,
to Garrick, owing to the confusion at Covent garden caused by the
death of Rich, Goldsmith had to go. The result might have been
foreseen. Garrick played fast and loosefinessed and temporised.
Then came the inevitable money advance, which enabled him to
suggest unwelcome changes in the MS, followed, of course, by fresh
mortifications for the luckless author. Eventually, The Good-
Natur'd Man was transferred to Colman, who, in the interval, had
become Rich's successor. But, even here, difficulties arose. Colman
did not care for the play, and the intrigues of Garrick still pursued
its writer; for Garrick persuaded Colman to defer its production
14-2


## p. 212 (#238) ############################################

2 1 2
Oliver Goldsmith
until after the appearance at Drury lane of a vapid sentimental
comedy by Kelly called False Delicacy, which, under Garrick's
clever generalship, had an unmerited success. Six days later, on
29 January 1768, the ill-starred Good-Natur’d Man was brought
out at Covent garden by a desponding manager, and a (for the most
part) depressed cast. Nor did it derive much aid from a ponderous
prologue by Johnson. Nevertheless, it was by no means ill received.
Shuter made a hit with Croaker, and Woodward was excellent as
Lofty, the two most important parts; and though, for a space, a
'genteel' audience could not suffer the 'low' scene of the bailiffs
to come between the wind and its nobility, the success of the
comedy, albeit incommensurate with its deserts and its author's
expectations, was more than respectable. It ran for nine nights,
three of which brought him £400; while the sale in book form, with
the omitted scene, added £100 more. The worst thing was that it
came after False Delicacy, instead of before it.
During its composition, Goldsmith had lived much at Islington,
having a room in queen Elizabeth's old hunting lodge, Canonbury
tower. In town, he had modest lodgings in the Temple. But £500
was too great a temptation; and, accordingly, leasing for three-
fourths of that sum a set of rooms in Brick court, he proceeded to
furnish them elegantly with Wilton carpets, moreen curtains and
Pembroke tables. Nil te quaesiveris extra, Johnson had wisely
said to him when he once apologised for his mean environment,
and it would have been well if he had remembered the monition.
But Goldsmith was Goldsmith-qualis ab incepto. The new expense
meant new needs—and new embarrassments. Hence, we hear of
Roman and English Histories for Davies and A History of Ani-
mated Nature for Griffin. The aggregate pay was more than £1500;
but, for the writer of a unique novel, an excellent comedy and a
deservedly successful poem, it was, assuredly, in his own words, 'to
,
cut blocks with a razor. ' All the same, he had not yet entirely lost
his delight of life. He could still enjoy country excursions— shoe-
makers' holidays' he called them—at Hampstead and Edgware;
could still alternate The Club' in Gerrard street with the Crown
at Islington and, occasionally, find pausing-places of memory and
retrospect when, softening toward the home of his boyhood with
a sadness made deeper by the death of his brother Henry in May
1768, he planned and perfected a new poem, The Deserted Village.
How far Auburn reproduced Lissoy, how far The Deserted
Village was English or Irish—are surely matters for the seed-
splitters of criticism; and decision either way in no wise affects
a


## p. 213 (#239) ############################################

The Deserted Village
213
the enduring beauty of the work. The poem holds us by the
humanity of its character pictures, by its delightful rural descrip-
tions, by the tender melancholy of its metrical cadences. Listen
to the 'Farewell' (and farewell it practically proved) to poetry:
Farewell, and 0, where'er thy voice be tried,
On Torno's cliffs, or Pambamarca's side,
Whether where equinoctial fervours glow,
Or winter wraps the polar world in snow,
Still let thy voice prevailing over Time,
Redress the rigours of th' inclement clime;
Aid slighted Truth, with thy persuasive strain
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;
Teach him, that states of native strength possest,
Though very poor, may still be very blest.
Here, Goldsmith ended, if we may rely on Boswell's attribution to
Johnson of the last four lines. They certainly supply a rounded
finish', and the internal evidence as to their authorship is not
very apparent. But, if they are really Johnson's, it is an open
question whether the more abrupt termination of Goldsmith,
resting, in Dantesque fashion, on the word 'blest,' is not to be
preferred.
Report says that Goldsmith's more critical contemporaries
ranked The Deserted Village below The Traveller-a mistake
perhaps to be explained by the intelligible, but often unreasoning,
prejudice in favour of a first impression. He was certainly paid
better for it, if it be true that he received a hundred guineas,
which, although five times as much as he got for The Traveller,
was still not more than Cadell paid six years later for Hannah
More's forgotten Sir Eldred of the Bower. The Deserted Village
was published on 26 May 1770, with an affectionate dedica-
tion to Reynolds, and ran through five editions in the year of
issue. In the July following its appearance, Goldsmith paid a short
visit to Paris with his Devonshire friends, Mrs and the Miss
Hornecks, the younger of whom he had fitted with the pretty pet
name 'the Jessamy Bride,' and who is supposed to have inspired
him with more than friendly feelings. On his return, he fell again
to the old desk work, a life of Bolingbroke, an abridgment of his
Roman History and so forth. But he still found time for the
exhibition of his more playful gifts, since it must have been about
cho
1
That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the laboured mole away ;
While self-respecting power can Time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky.


## p. 214 (#240) ############################################

214
Oliver Goldsmith
>
this date that, in the form of an epistle to his friend Lord Clare,
he threw off that delightful medley of literary recollection and
personal experience, the verses known as The Haunch of Venison,
in which the ease and lightness of Prior are wedded to the best
measure of Swift. If the chef d'oeuvre be really the equal of the
chef d'oeuvre, there is little better in Goldsmith's work than this
pleasant jeu d'esprit. But he had a yet greater triumph to come,
for, by the end of 1771, he had completed his second and more
successful comedy, She Stoops to Conquer.
At this date, the worries and vexations which had accompanied
the production of The Good-Natur'd Man had been more or less
forgotten by its author; and, as they faded, Goldsmith's old dreams
of theatrical distinction returned. The sentimental snake, moreover,
was not even scotched; and 'genteel comedy'—that'mawkish drab
of spurious breed,' as the opportunist Garrick came eventually to
style it-had still its supporters : witness The West Indian of
Cumberland, which had just been produced. Falling back on an
earlier experience of his youth, the mistaking of squire Feather-
ston's house for an inn, Goldsmith set to work on a new comedy;
and, after much rueful wandering in the lanes of Hendon and
Edgware, studying jests with the most tragical countenance,' Tony
Lumpkin and his mother, Mr Hardcastle and his daughter, were
gradually brought into being, “to be tried in the manager's fire. '
The ordeal was to the full as severe as before. Colman accepted
the play, and then delayed to produce it. His tardiness em-
barrassed the author so much that, at last, in despair, he transferred
the piece to Garrick. But, here, Johnson interposed, and, though
he could not induce Colman to believe in it, by the exercise of a
kind of force, prevailed on him to bring it out. Finally, after it
had been read to the Club,' in January 1773, under its first title
The Old House, a New Inn, and, assisted to some extent by
Foote's clever anti-sentimental puppet-show Piety in Pattens ;
or, the Handsome Housemaid, it was produced at Covent garden
on 15 March 1773, as She Stoops to Conquer; or, the Mistakes
of a Night. When on the boards, supported by the suf-
frages of the author's friends, and enthusiastically welcomed by
the public, the play easily triumphed over a caballing manager and
a lukewarm company, and, thus, one of the best modern comedies
was at once lifted to an eminence from which it has never since
been deposed. It brought the author four or five hundred pounds,
and would have brought him more by its sale in book form, had
he not, in a moment of depression, handed over the copyright to


## p. 215 (#241) ############################################

Closing Years and Death
215
Newbery, in discharge of a debt. But he inscribed the play to
Johnson, in one of those dedications which, more, perhaps, than else-
where, vindicate his claim to the praise of having touched nothing
that he did not adorn.
Unhappily, by this time, his affairs had reached a stage of
complication from which little short of a miracle could extricate
him; and there is no doubt that his involved circumstances affected
his health, as he had already been seriously ill in 1772. During the
few months of life that remained to him, he did not publish anything,
his hands being full of promised work. His last metrical effort
was Retaliation, a series of epitaph-epigrams, left unfinished at his
death, and prompted by some similar, though greatly inferior, efforts
directed against him by Garrick and other friends. In March 1774,
the combined effects of work and worry, added to a local disorder,
brought on a nervous fever which he aggravated by the unwise use
of a patent medicine, James's powder, on which, like many of his
contemporaries, he placed too great a reliance. On the 10th, he
had dined with Percy at the Turk’s Head. Not many days after,
when Percy called on him, he was ill. A week later, the sick
man just recognised his visitor. On Monday, 4 April, he died;
and he was buried on the 9th in the burial ground of the Temple
church. Two years subsequently, a memorial was erected to him
in Westminster abbey, with a Latin epitaph by Johnson, containing,
among other things, the oft-quoted affectuum potens, at lenis domi-
nator. An even more suitable farewell is, perhaps, to be found in
the simpler 'valediction cum osculo' which his rugged old friend
inserted in a letter to Langton: 'Let not his frailties be remem-
bered; he was a very great man. '
Goldsmith's physical likeness must be sought between the
idealised portrait painted by Reynolds early in 1770, and the
semi-grotesque 'head' by Bunbury prefixed to the posthumous
issue in 1776 of The Haunch of Venison. As to his character,
it has suffered a little from the report of those to whom, like
Walpole, Garrick, Hawkins and Boswell, his peculiarities were
more apparent than his genius; though certain things must be
admitted because he admits them himself. Both early and late,
he confesses to a trick of blundering, a slow and hesitating utter-
ance, an assumed pomposity which looked like self-importance.
He had also a distinct brogue which he cultivated rather than
corrected. But as to talking like poor Poll,' the dictum requires
qualification. It is quite intelligible that, in the dominating
presence of Johnson, whose magisterial manner overrode both
>


## p. 216 (#242) ############################################

216
Oliver Goldsmith
Burke and Gibbon, Goldsmith, who was twenty years younger,
whose wit reached its flashing point but fitfully, and who was
easily disconcerted in argument, should not have appeared at his
best, though there were cases when, to use a colloquialism, he
‘got home' even on the great man himself-witness the happy
observation that Johnson would make the little fishes of fable-land
talk like whales. But evidence is not wanting that Goldsmith
could converse delightfully in more congenial companies. With
respect to certain other imputed shortcomings—the love of fine
clothes, for instance—the most charitable explanation is the desire
to extenuate physical deficiencies, inseparable from a morbid
self-consciousness; while, as regards his extravagance, something
should be allowed for the accidents of his education, and for the
canker of poverty which had eaten into his early years. And it
must be remembered that he would give his last farthing to any
plausible applicant, and that he had the kindest heart in the
world.
As a literary man, what strikes one most is the individuality,
the intellectual detachment of his genius. He is a standing illus-
tration of Boswell's clever contention that the fowls running about
the yard are better flavoured than those which are fed in coops.
He belonged to no school; he formed none. If, in his verse, we
find traces of Addison or Prior, of Lesage or Fielding in his novel,
of Farquhar or Cibber in his comedies, those traces are in the
pattern and not in the stuff. The stuff is Goldsmith-Goldsmith's
philosophy, Goldsmith's heart, Goldsmith's untaught grace, sim-
plicity, sweetness. He was but forty-six when he died; and he
was maturing to the last. Whether his productive period had
ceased, whether, with a longer span, he would have gone higher-
may be doubted. But, notwithstanding a mass of hackwork which
his faculty of lucid exposition almost raised to a fine art, he con-
trived, even in his short life, to leave behind him some of the most
finished didactic poetry in the language; some unsurpassed familiar
verse; a series of essays ranking only below Lamb's; a unique and
original novel; and a comedy which, besides being readable, is still
acted to delighted audiences. He might have lived longer and
done less; but at least he did not live long enough to fall below
his best.


## p. 217 (#243) ############################################

CHAPTER X
THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
MACPHERSON'S OSSIAN. CHATTERTON.
PERCY AND THE WARTONS
It is scarcely a paradox to say that the Middle Ages have
influenced modern literature more strongly through their archi-
tecture than through their poems. Gothic churches and old
castles have exerted a medieval literary influence on many
authors who have had no close acquaintance with old French
and German poets, and not much curiosity about their ideals or
their style. Even in writers better qualified by study of medieval
literature, like Southey and Scott, it is generally the historical
substance of the Middle Ages rather than anything in the imagina-
tive form of old poetry or romance that attracts them. Even
William Morris, who is much more affected by the manner of old
poetry than Scott, is curiously unmedieval in much of his poetry;
there is nothing of the old fashion in the poem The Defence of
Guenevere, and the old English rhythm of the song in Sir Peter
Harpdon's End is in striking contrast, almost a discord, with the
dramatic blank verse of the piece. Medieval verse has seldom been
imitated or revived without the motive of parody, as, for instance,
in Swinburne's Masque of Queen Bersabe ; the great exception is
in the adoption of the old ballad measures, from which English
poetry was abundantly refreshed through Wordsworth, Scott and
Coleridge. And here, also, though the ballad measures live and
thrive all through the nineteenth century so naturally that few
people think of their debt to Percy's Reliques, yet, at the be-
ginning, there is parody in the greatest of all that race, The
Ancient Mariner-not quite so obvious in the established version
as in the first editions (in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and 1800),
but still clear enough.
The Middle Ages did much to help literary fancy long be-
fore the time of Scott; but the thrill of mystery and wonder came
-


## p. 218 (#244) ############################################

218 The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages
much more from Gothic buildings than from Morte d'Arthur, and
it is found in writers who had paid little or no attention to old
English romance, as well as in those who showed their interest in it.
The famous passage in Congreve's Mourning Bride is romantic in
spirit and intention, and its success is won from a Gothic cathedral,
with no intermediary literature. So, also, the romantic ruin in the
first version of Collins's Ode to Evening, 'whose walls more awful
nod,' is pictorial, not literary, except in the conventional ‘nod,'
which is literary, indeed, but not at all medieval. This ‘nod,' by
the way, has been carefully studied in Guesses at Truth? ; it is
a good criterion of the eighteenth century romantic style; Collins,
happily, got rid of it, and saved his poem unblemished.
Medieval literary studies undoubtedly encouraged the taste
for such romantic effects as are beheld when abbeys or ruined
castles are visited by twilight or moonlight; but the literary
Gothic terror or wonder could be exercised without any more
knowledge of the Middle Ages than Victor Hugo possessed, whose
Notre Dame de Paris owes hardly anything of its triumph to
medieval books. On the other hand, there was much literature of
the Middle Ages known and studied in the earlier part of the
eighteenth century without any great effect upon the aims or sensi-
bilities of practising men of letters. There seems to have been no
such prejudice against medieval literature, as there undoubtedly
was, for a long time, against Gothic architecture. “Black letter'
poetry and the books of chivalry were, naturally and rightly, be-
lieved to be old-fashioned, but they were not depreciated more
emphatically than were the Elizabethans; and, perhaps, the very
want of exact historical knowledge concerning the Middle Ages
allowed reading men to judge impartially when medieval things
came under their notice. Dryden’s praise of Chaucer is, altogether
and in every particular, far beyond the reach of his age in criticism;
but it is not at variance with the common literary judgment of
his time, or of Pope's. The principle is quite clear; in dealing
with Chaucer, one must allow for his ignorance of true English
verse and, of course, for his old English phrasing ; but, then, he is
to be taken on his merits, for his imagination and his narrative
skill, and, so taken, he comes out a better example of sound
poetical wit than Ovid himself, and more truly a follower of nature.
Pope sees clearly and is not put off by literary prejudices ; the
theme of Eloisa to Abelard is neither better nor worse for
dating back to the twelfth century, and he appropriates The
1 Pp. 44 ff. Eversley Series edn. 1897.
9


## p. 219 (#245) ############################################

Dryden, Addison and Pope 219
Temple of Fame from Chaucer because he finds that its substance
is good enough for him. Addison's estimate of Chevy Chace is
made in nearly the same spirit; only, here something controversial
comes in. He shows that the old English ballad has some of
the qualities of classical epic ; epic virtues are not exclusively
Greek and Roman. Yet, curiously, there is an additional moral;
the ballad is not used as an alternative to the modern taste for
correct writing, but, on the contrary, as a reproof to the meta-
physical school, an example of the essential and inherent perfection
of simplicity of thought. ' It is significant that the opposite
manner, which is not simple, but broken up into epigram and
points of wit, is called 'Gothick' by Addison ; the imitators of
Cowley are 'Gothick’; the medieval ballad, which many people
would have reckoned “Gothick,' is employed as an example of
classical simplicity to refute them. 'Gothick' was so very generally
used to denote what is now called 'medieval '—'the Gothick
romances,' 'the Gothick mythology of elves and fairies'—that
Addison's paradoxical application of the term in those two papers
can hardly have been unintentional; it shows, at any rate, that
the prejudice against Gothic art did not mislead him in his
judgment of old-fashioned poetry. In his more limited measure,
he agrees with Dryden and Pope. What is Gothic in date may be
classical in spirit.
Medievalism was one of the minor eccentric fashions of the
time, noted by Dryden in his reference to his old Saxon friends,
and by Pope with his ‘mister wight'; but those shadows of 'The
Upheaving of Ælfred' were not strong enough, for good or
ill, either to make a romantic revival or to provoke a modern
curse on paladins and troubadours. Rymer, indeed, who knew
more than anyone else about old French and Provençal poetry,
was the loudest champion of the unities and classical authority.
Medieval studies, including the history of poetry, could be carried
on without any particular bearing on modern productive art, with
no glimmering of a medievalist romantic school and no threatening
of insult or danger to the most precise and scrupulous modern
taste. It would seem that the long battle of the books, the
debate of ancients and moderns in France and England, had
greatly mitigated, if not altogether quenched, the old jealousy of
the Middle Ages which is exemplified in Ben Jonson's tirade :
6
No Knights o' the Sun, nor Amadis de Gauls,
Primaleons, Pantagruels, public nothings,
Abortives of the fabulous dark cloister.


## p. 220 (#246) ############################################

220 The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages
This is the old scholarly contempt for the Middle Ages ; it
is coming to be out of date in Jonson's time. The books of
chivalry recovered some of their favour, as they ceased to be
dangerous distractions; those who laughed at The Knight of the
Burning Pestle were not ashamed to read The Seven Champions
of Christendom. There is a pleasant apology for the old romances
by Chapelain in France, an author more determined than Ben
Jonson in his obedience to literary rules. And it may be supposed
that, later, when the extreme modern party had gone so far as to
abuse Homer for his irregularities and barbarous want of taste,
there would be less inclination among sensible men to find fault
with medieval roughness; cavilling at superfluities in romance
might be all very well, but it was too like the scandalous treatment
of Homer by Perrault and his party ; those, on the other hand,
who stood up for Homer might be the less ready to censure
Amadis of Gaul. There may be something of this motive in
Addison's praise of Chevy Chace ; at any rate, he has sense to find
the classical excellences where the pedantic moderns would not
look for anything of the sort.
Modern literature and the minds of modern readers are so
affected by different strains of medieval influence through various
' romantic' schools, through history, travel and the study of
languages, that it is difficult to understand the temper of the
students who broke into medieval antiquities in the seventeenth
century and discovered much poetry by the way, though their
chief business was with chronicles and state papers. It is safe to
believe that everything which appeals to any reader as peculiarly
medieval in the works of Tennyson or Rossetti was not apparent
to Hickes or Hearne or Rymer, any more than it was to Leibniz
(a great medieval antiquary), or, later, to Muratori, who makes
poetry one of his many interests in the course of work resembling
Rymer's, though marked by better taste and intelligence. The
Middle Ages were studied, sometimes, with a view to modern
applications ; but these were generally political or religious, not
literary. And, in literary studies, it is long before anything like
Ivanhoe or anything like The Defence of Guenevere is discernible.
Before the spell of the grail was heard again, and before the vision
of Dante was at all regarded, much had to be learned and many
experiments to be made. The first attraction from the Middle
Ages, coming as a discovery due to antiquarian research and not
by way of tradition, was that of old northern heroic poetry,
commonly called Icelandic— Islandic,' as Percy spells it. Gray,


## p. 221 (#247) ############################################

Temple, The Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok 22 I
when he composed The Descent of Odin and The Fatal Sisters,
drew from sources which had been made known in England in
the seventeenth century. These, in their effect on English readers,
formed the first example of the literary influence of the Middle
Ages, consciously recognised as such, and taken up with anti-
quarian literary interest.
Of course, the whole of modern literature is full of the Middle
Ages; the most disdainful modern classicist owes, in France, his
alexandrine verse to the twelfth century and, in England, his
heroic verse to a tradition older still. The poet who stands for
the perfection of the renascence in Italy, Ariosto, derives his
stanza from the lyric school of Provence, and is indebted for most
of his matter to old romances. Through Chaucer and Spenser,
through The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, through many
chapbooks and through the unprinted living folklore of England,
the Middle Ages formed the minds of Dryden and Pope and
their contemporaries. But, for a distinct and deliberate notice of
something medieval found by study and considered to be avail-
able in translation or adaptation, one must go to Sir William
Temple's remarks about The Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok; it is
hard to find anything of the same sort earlier. What marks it out
is not so much the literary curiosity which selects it, but the
literary estimate which judges this ancient northern piece to
have a present value. Thereby, Sir William Temple begins
the modern sort of literary study which looks for suggestion
in old remote and foreign regions, and he sets a precedent
for the explorations of various romantic schools, wandering
through all the world in search of plots, scenery and local
colour.
Here, it may be objected that this kind of exploration was
nothing new; that the Middle Ages themselves had collected
stories from all the ends of the earth; that Elizabethans range
as far as Southey or Victor Hugo ; that Racine, toc, calculates
the effect of what is distant and what is foreign, in his choice
of subjects for tragedy, Iphigénie or Bajazet. What, then, is
specially remarkable in the fact that Scandinavian legend was
noted as interesting, and that Sir William Temple gave an hour of
study to the death-song of Ragnar? The novelty is in the historical
motive. The Death-Song of Ragnar is intelligible without much
historical commentary; anyone can understand the emphatic
phrases: ‘we smote with swords' (pugnavimus ensibus); “laughing
I die' (ridens moriar)-not to speak of the mistranslated lines


## p. 222 (#248) ############################################

222 The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages
which represent the heroes in Valhalla drinking ale out of the
skulls of their enemies :
Bibemus cerevisiam
Ex concavis crateribus craniorum.
Those things caught men's fancy; and the honourable, courageous
viking was launched to try his fortune in modern romantic litera-
ture. But there was the historical interest, besides ; and Temple,
in his essay Of Heroic Virtue, notices the song of Ragnar because
it explains something in the past, and contributes something to
the experience of the human race. He takes up 'runic' literature
again in his essay Of Poetry; he is working on the same lines as
Sidney and attending the progress of poesy from its early life
among the barbarians. He vindicates, like Daniel, the right of the
Gothic nations to a share in the humanities. And he proves, by
particulars, what Sidney and Daniel had left vague; he exhibits
this specimen from a definite tract of country; and his quotation
has a double effect; it touches those readers who may be looking
for a new thrill and fresh sources of amazement; it touches those
also who, besides this craving, are curious about the past; who are
historically minded and who try to understand the various fashions
of thought in different ages. Thus, one significance of this quotation
from Ragnar's death-song is that it helps to alter the historical
view of the world. Historical studies had suffered from the old
prevalent opinion (still strong in the eighteenth century, if not
later) that all ages of the world are very much alike. The Death-
Song of Ragnar and other references to the heroic poetry of
Norway were like distance marks which brought out the perspec-
tive.
Scandinavian suggestions did not lead immediately to any
very large results in English poetry or fiction. Macpherson came
in later and took their ground; the profits all went to Ossian.
Students of northern antiquities were too conscientious and not
daring enough ; Percy's Five Pieces of Runic Poetry came out
humbly in the wake of Macpherson ; his book is like what the
Icelanders, in a favourite contemptuous figure, call the little
boat towed behind! But the history of Scandinavian studies is
worth some notice, though Odin and his friends achieved no such
sweeping victories as the heroes of Morven.
Temple's authorities are Scandinavian, not English, scholars;
he conversed at Nimeguen on these subjects with count
1 . It would be as vain to deny, as it is perhaps impolitic to mention, that this
attempt is owing to the success of the Erse fragments' (Five Pieces, 1763, Preface).


## p. 223 (#249) ############################################

Northern Studies : Hickes's Thesaurus
223
Oxenstierna, and he quotes from Olaus Wormius. But northern
studies were already flourishing in England by means of the Oxford
press, to which Junius had given founts of type from which were
printed his Gothic and Old English gospels, and where the founts
are still preserved and ready for use. Junius's type was used in
printing Hickes's Icelandic grammar, which was afterwards included
in the magnificent Thesaurus Linguarum Veterum Septentrion-
alium. It was used, also, for E. Go's (Edmund Gibson's) Oxford
edition of Polemo-Middinia and of Christis Kirk on the Grene
(1691), which was brought out as a philological joke, with no detri-
ment to philological science. Gothic, Icelandic, Old English and
the languages of Chaucer and Gawain Douglas are all employed in
illustration of these two excellent comic poems, for the benefit of
the 'joco-serious Commonwealth' to which the book is dedicated.
Hickes's Thesaurus is a great miscellaneous work on the
antiquities of all the Teutonic languages. One page in it has now
the authority of an original Old English document, for there he
printed the heroic lay of Finnsburh from a manuscript at Lambeth
which is not at present to be found. On the opposite page and
immediately following is an Icelandic poem : Hervor at her father
Angantyr's grave, calling upon him to give up the magic sword
which had been buried with him. This poem is translated into
English prose, and it had considerable effect on modern literature.
It was thought good enough, and not too learned or recondite, to
be reprinted in the new edition of Dryden's Miscellany, Part vi,
in 1716, Icelandic text and all. It seems to have been an after-
thought of the editor, or in compliance with a suggestion from
outside which the editor was too idle to refuse—for the piece is
printed with Hickes's heading, which refers to the preceding piece
(Finnsburh) in the Thesaurus and compares the Icelandic with
the Old English verse-quite unintelligible as it stands, abruptly,
in the Miscellany? But, however it came about, the selection
is a good one, and had as much success as is possible to those
shadowy ancient things. It is repeated, under the title The
Incantation of Hervor by Percy, as the first of his Five Runic
Pieces; and, after this, it became a favourite subject for para-
phrase; it did not escape ‘Monk’ Lewis; and it appears as L'Épée
d'Angantyr in the Poëmes barbares of Leconte de Lisle.
Percy's second piece is The Dying Ode of Ragnar Lodbrog.
This had not been left unnoticed after Temple's quotation from it.
Thomas Warton the elder translated the two stanzas which Temple
1 Part vi.


## p. 224 (#250) ############################################

224 The Literary Influence of the Middle Ages
took from his authority, the Literatura Runica of Olaus Wormius;
they appeared as 'a Runic Ode' in the posthumous volume of his
poems (1748). They counted for something in the education of
Thomas the younger and Joseph Warton, together with the
architecture of Winchester and Windsor, and the poetry of
Spenser and Milton.
It will be observed that Old English poetry had none of this
success--very slight success indeed, but still ascertainable—which
attended The Death-Song of Ragnar and The Incantation of
Hervor. Perhaps, if Hickes had translated The Fight at Finns-
burh—but he did not, and so the Icelandic page was taken and
the Old English left. Apart from that accident, there was good
reason for the greater success of the 'runic' or 'Islandic' poems.
They are much more compact and pointed than anything in Old
English. The poem of Hervor is an intensely passionate lyrical
drama ; the song of Ragnar is an emphatic rendering of the heroic
spirit of the north ; the poem is itself the product of an early
romantic movement which had learned the artistic use of heroic
phrases, and makes the most of them in a loud metallic way. The
literary artifice can be detected now; the difference from the
older heroic style is as great as that between Burns and Barbour
in their idea of the valiant king Robert and the eloquence of
Bannockburn. But this calculated and brassy emphasis all went
to establish The Death-Song as a remarkable proof of early poetical
genius in the north, and a type of northern heroic virtue.
The other three pieces in Percy's volume had less vogue than
Ragnar and the sword of Angantyr. One is The Ransome of Egill
the Scald, taken from Olaus Wormius. It had been appreciated
already by Temple, who calls the poet by the name of his father,
but means Egil when he says 'Scallogrim. The passage may be
quoted; it follows immediately on The Death-Song of Ragnar :
I am deceived, if in this sonnet, and a following ode of Scallogrim (which was
likewise made by him after he was condemned to die, and deserved his pardon
for a reward) there be not a vein truely poetical, and in its kind Pindaric,
taking it with the allowance of the different climates, fashions, opinions, and
languages of such distant countries.