The Club
Author Feature:
Oliver Goldsmith The Literary Club, inaugurated by Sir Joshua
Reynolds in 1764, began with nine members, including besides Johnson and Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Beauclerk, Langton, Dr. Percy, and Oliver
Goldsmith. Goldsmith was then thirty-six, had just won fame with
his poem, The Traveller, and entered upon his ten last
illustrious but uneasy years.
He was born and lived almost half his life in the lovely lap of
country near Athlone in the centre of Ireland. There, whether as
a child, a youth, or later a lively young buckeen, among the
hamlets of Lissoy, Pallas, and Kilkenny West, where his revered
father was vicar, the remote, simple, genial, droll life of the
region entered deeply into his sensitive and tender heart. For
nearly four years he was absent at Trinity College, Dublin,
picking up a sort of education as a "sizar," amid
menial poverty and odd irregularities.
Then came over a year's "study" of medicine at
Edinburgh, followed by obscure wanderings on the Continent, in
Holland, France, Switzerland, and Italy. One wonders why somebody
did not get from him, and record, the details of his mildly
picaresque adventures. Many of them are certainly embodied in his
writings, but cannot be detached as facts. Perhaps he played his
flute or told old tales for lodging in a peasant's hut; perhaps
he joined a troupe of barnstormers; perhaps he debated at
universities for money--as Johnson said, "disputed" his
way through Europe. One thing is sure--the facts cannot be
ascertained, simply because a fact, once entered into Goldsmith's
genial Irish mind, always became so drenched and dyed in his
innocent imagination that not even he could know it for a fact
afterwards. After all the man was a great poet. "Remote,
unfriended, melancholy" he may have been at times, yet no
one can doubt that his warm Irish heart found an easy if
uncertain way along the road, especially among the picturesque
oddities of the common life he loved.
After three or more elusive years in vagabondia he turns up in
London, drudging with his pen for the slave-drivers Griffith and
Smollett, and later for Newbery. What he got he spent in headlong
profusion on himself or others. It was a family trait --"this
romantic turn," as he calls it. "Whence this love for
every place and every country but that in which we reside? for
every occupation but our own? this desire of fortune and yet this
eagerness to dissipate?" So in spite of fame and friends,
his hackwork continued, and had to continue, to the end, writing,
editing, compiling, translating, abridging. He really worked
himself to death, producing among others a treatise on the Cock
Lane ghost, two histories of England, a Roman history, a "Grecian"
history, short biographies, of Voltaire, Baling-brake, Parnell,
and one of Beau Nash, a masterpiece, besides Poems for Young
Ladies and Beauties of English Poesy; and in his last year an
eight-volume History of Animated Nature, about which he knew
nothing at first hand. Yet Goldsmith on the Ant or the Crocodile
is so entertaining as to disconcert the most insistent passion
for literal and scientific accuracy. But however unrelieved his
drudgery, no shred of his work is without at least a tinge of his
warmth and charm, and his greater works are distinguished by
having more of it. "My head has no share in all I write; my
heart dictates the whole." His Enquiry into the Present
State of Polite Learning (1759) is a series of engaging essays on
literary conditions of the times. It brought him Percy's
friendship. He had found for a short time his special excellence
in the periodical essay. Scattered specimens, the Bee, and the
hundred and twenty and odd letters that comprise the Citizen of
the World, are no mere imitations of his predecessors, but
Goldsmith's own. Old subjects turn up amid the new, and he is
humorist, gentle satirist, poet, critic, by turns. Now it is the
old Irish bard Carolan that engages us, now a reminiscence of how
"our old dairy-maid sang me into tears with Johnny Armstrong's
Last Goodnight, or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen"; now queer
bodies about town; now the new sect of Methodists; now the
stagecoach of Fame in which Johnson, soon to be the author's
friend, is a worthy passenger; now a visit to St. Paul's or the
Abbey, Vauxhall or Ranelagh; now the oriental craze or the
pretentious connoisseur; now a romantic revery on the city at
night, anticipating Carlyle.
The Citizen purports to be letters written home by a Chinese
mandarin from England, whose artless comment touches English
foibles with mild satire. A very slender tale of separated lovers
helps the continuity of the series, as do two characters, the
sensible Man in Black, and poor faded little Beau Tibbs and his
wife, who are always trying to keep up appearances. Story and
characters obviously grew as Goldsmith went along, and contain
the germ of a novel. The device was that of Montesquieu's Lettres
Persanes, 1721, and Boyer's Lettres Chinoises, i755, from both of
which Goldsmith took many suggestions, and he knew also the four
Indian kings in the Spectator, and Marana's Turkish Spy
translated from the French in x687-93. But the Citizen is only
another specimen of oriental fashions in all directions, which
had been chiefly engendered and nourished in great luxuriance by
the English version of the Arabian Nights about 1710, and the
increasing oriental trade. The title too is significant of the
cosmopolitanism which was a fashion with some of those who took
the Grand Tour, with others a serious philosophic ideal. Says
Boswell, recalling his travels: "I am, I flatter myself,
completely a citizen of the world."
Goldsmith's fame in his day was founded on his poem The Traveller,
a cosmopolitan review, like Thomson's Liberty, of various
countries of Europe, with a grand finale in praise--and criticism--of
British freedom. The poem concludes with lines contributed by
Johnson, observing
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
It is a true-to-form eeighteenth century poem, in couplets, well-ordered,
on an abstract subject, fully equipped with moral sentiments and
generalized description. Yet in the almost outworn couplet is
audible a new, plaintive, and gentle music; and the fabric is
studded, jewel-wise, with delicate idylls, miniatures of folk
life in different lands, done from the life no doubt, yet
shimmering in that unfading light that never was on sea or land.
For Goldsmith ranks with Theocritus and Virgil and Milton as one
of the supreme idyllists.
Even greater power in this kind he puts forth in The Deserted
Village. Whatever point it made in its time about luxury and
emigration, its lasting glory is its idyllism of the village, the
dance, the evening out of doors and in, the tavern, the
schoolmaster, the old vicar. Both real and transfigured, as the
best idylls are, they lure the reader on to hunt for their
originals, in a hopeless hope of getting nearer to them. To
Lissoy and other village haunts of the poet, we hurry, only to be
disappointed; and this disappointment is but a proof of the poet's
transforming, sublimating power.
One morning probably in 1762 Johnson was summoned to Goldsmith,
who was in acute pecuniary distress, with no assets but a
manuscript "novel." This Johnson sold for sixty pounds,
and temporarily relieved the situation. What thousands that
manuscript would fetch today no one can say; it was the Vicar of
Wakefield.
Publication was delayed till after the author was famous by The
Traveller. Perhaps this was lucky, for as a mere story the Vicar
repeats many of the old devices of distress resolved by' absurd
coincidence. But its eternal values are in its delectable humors,
now roisterous, now subtle, never cheap nor coarse; in its
idyllism, especially of the fourth and fifth chapters; in a
certain grandeur imparted to the whole by the vicar, at once
innocent and wise, unsophisticated yet with a heart close to all
sorts and conditions. Humors, poetic beauty, and grandeur are so
inseparably mingled, that the book abounds in moments that will
never lose their effect. Who can cease to delight in Michaelmas
Eve at neighbor Flamborough's, with hot cockles and the amenities
of Lady Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs? Or in the family
portrait of the Vicar's matronly wife as Venus, receiving from
the Vicar a copy of his works on the Whistonian controversy about
monogamy?
The same delicate humors of common life, the same warm intimacy
pervade his comedies, especially She Stoops to Conquer. No comedy
in years, said Johnson, had so fulfilled "the end of comedy--making
an audience merry." It never fails to transform a theatreful
of utter strangers into a genial and friendly party, everyone
wishing he could find himself a guest in the old country house of
Squire Hardcastle, who loves everything that's old: old friends,
old times, old manners, old books, old wine; or to forgather for
a song with Tony Lumpkin at the Three Pigeons and with Master
Muggins, who hates anything "low", since "the
genteel thing is the genteel thing any time if so be that a
gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly."
The managers, even Garrick, were afraid of Goldsmith's plays.
Sentimental comedy, vapid, humorless, sententious, with its
stupid elegancies and scrupulous delicacies, so genteel, so
squeamish of anything "low," still held the boards.
Garrick must have known how silly it was; but business was
business, and the public would never accept the humors of
Goldsmith's bailiffs and taverns and hobbledehoy and general
rural horsiness, however softened by the poet's charm. The Good
Natured Man had only a qualified success in 1768, and Goldsmith's
sensitive nerves were frayed by the wear and tear of theatrical
friction. Alone with Johnson after the first performance, he
broke down in tears and threw himself upon the stout and
comforting heart of his friend. Five years later, after much
dickering with the theatres, She Stoops to Conquer not only
scored brilliantly, but under its human warmth and naturalness
sentimental comedy melted and collapsed for ever.
In a little over a year the author was dead. His body lies in the
Temple yard, but no one knows the exact spot.
Goldsmith is at once curiously elusive and intimate. The facts of
his early life, his wanderings, even his burial-place have
generally slipped away or refuse to be facts when he is con-suited.
Elusive too is the charm of his style and his art. Yet he had
vast capacity for friendship, and tn no poet has the human heart
so warmed in personal affection as to him. Johnson saw something
of the universality of his genius, and therefore refused to write
his epitaph in any but a universal language. And he seems to have
realized Goldsmith's transforming power in recording that,
whatever literary form he chose, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit--he
touched none that he did not adorn. Said the Doctor: "Let
not his frailties be remembered- he was a very great man."
- Charles Grosvenor Osgood, The Voice of England, 2nd Ed., 1935,
1952 Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York.
© Copyright 1998 Christopher D. Ball