MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS.
I should be sorry if I left you with the impression that the letters from which I have been reading extracts were the only original documents connected with the poet and his works included in Dr. Percy’s manuscript bundle of “Goldsmithiana.” The contrary is the case: but the time available to me this afternoon is too short to enable me to discuss the various interesting points that they raise. I feel, however, I must refer in the briefest manner possible to some miscellaneous papers of different kinds which I found therein relating to the preliminaries for and the production of that delightful and ever-fresh comedy of “She Stoops to Conquer,” first given to the world on Monday, 15 March, 1773. There are a letter from the Prompter dated “Sunday evening” (no doubt 14 March, 1773), saying he had taken the necessary steps for changing the name of the play from “The Mistakes of a Night”; orders for boxes for subsequent performances; requests for free seats; congratulations and criticism on its success; a full account in Percy’s writing of Goldsmith’s personal chastisement of Evans the bookseller for Kenrick’s malicious article in the London Packet of Wednesday, 24 March, 1773 (endorsed in the Bishop’s hand “The termination of the affray with Evans, as first intended, but afterwards altered out of tenderness to Dr. G’s Memory”); a printed copy of the London Packet of Friday, 26 March, containing its own account of the encounter with Evans; George Coleman’s original letter of 23 March, 1773, begging Goldsmith to “take him off the rack of the newspapers”; manuscript copies (not in Goldsmith’s writing) of two rejected Epilogues to the play; and other documents of great human interest.
As I have consistently tried in this address to avoid indulging in theories, and to limit myself to demonstrable facts, I refrain from a discussion as to why these documents of 1773 are in such force in the resuscitated bundle of Percy papers, whereas there are comparatively few and scattered documents of earlier date. I should not, however, be surprised if Goldsmith, dreading that the commotion caused and public comment excited by his scuffle with Evans might involve him in further disagreeable consequences, had himself collected these papers and consulted Percy personally thereon, with the result that they remained in the latter’s custody.
When nearly a quarter of a century later, Percy put his hand to the preparation of the Memoir of his friend, he may have thought that the discreditable incidents obscuring the memory of a great public success were best buried in oblivion; and he therefore confined himself in the published work to the statement that “She Stoops to Conquer” “added very much to the author’s reputation, and brought down upon him a torrent of congratulatory addresses and petitions from less fortunate bards whose indigence compelled them to solicit his bounty, and of scurrilous abuse from such of them, as being less reduced, only envied his success.” (Memoir, p. 101.)
Percy could not, it is true, resist the temptation of placing on record in the Memoir “Tom Tickle’s” attack on Goldsmith in the London Packet: but, says he, “we would not defile our page with this scurrilous production, so shall insert it in the margin.” (pp. 103-5, notes.)
It seems to me not unlikely that Percy’s opinion was sought as to the wording of the defence or disclaimer by Goldsmith “To the Public” which appeared in the Daily Advertiser of 31 March, 1773, as this also is printed in extenso in the Memoir of 1801 (pp. 107-8). Dr. Johnson had certainly no hand in its preparation, for on Saturday, 3 April, in response to an enquiry by the obsequious Boswell, he said: “Sir, Dr. Goldsmith would no more have asked me to have wrote such a thing as that for him, than he would have asked me to feed him with a spoon, or to do anything else that denoted imbecility.... He has indeed done it very well, but it is a foolish thing well done.” Percy says in the Memoir (p. 107): “The subject of this dispute was long discussed in the public papers, which discanted on the impropriety of attacking a man in his own house: and an action was threatened for the assault: which was at length compromised”: and here he leaves it, as we may well do.
One other matter connected with “She Stoops to Conquer” I must ask your permission to touch upon before I conclude. Four attempts were made at an Epilogue for the play, and the Percy documents enable us for the first time to understand the sequence of these. Two of them were printed (not quite textually) in Vol. II of the Memoir of 1801, and Percy, who set great store by them, complains to his correspondents that enough credit was not given to him by the publishers for them. He told Dr. Robert Anderson:
“The Dr. had likewise given him two original Poems that had never been printed. These are the two Epilogues printed in the second Volume, viz: that spoken by Mrs. Bulkley and Miss Catley, and that intended for Mrs. Bulkley. The latter [it] is said in a Note, was given in Manuscript to Dr. Percy by the Author, but no such mention is made of the former, tho’ it was also so given by him and delivered to the Publishers in his own writing.”
Percy was a little in doubt about the second of these Epilogues (which in the edition of 1801 he cut down from 58 lines to 42), for he invited George Steevens on 10 September, 1797, to ask Mrs. Bulkley if she remembered for what play it was intended: “He [Goldsmith] gave it me among a parcel of letters and papers, some written by himself, and some addressed to him, but with not much explanation” (Literary Illustrations, VII, 31). Steevens’ reply of 14 September, 1797, was in his usual caustic vein: “The lady you would have interrogated ceased to be at least seven years ago: and what would the public say could it be known that your Lordship, a Protestant Bishop, was desirous to send your sober correspondents into the other world a harlot-hunting?” (Ibid, 32).
It is a little surprising that the Bishop should not have at once recognised its obvious associations with “She Stoops to Conquer,” in view of the two lines at the end of the Epilogue:
“No high-life scenes, no sentiment: the creature
“Still stoops among the low to copy nature.”
But all these points, in their way interesting and even absorbing, are rather beyond the object with which I embarked upon this paper, viz.: to do justice to the affectionate side of Goldsmith’s warm Irish nature by bringing into relief the letters which, despite his repugnance to correspondence, he from time to time addressed to members of his own family with ardent and even pitiful appeals for news from Ireland. These appeals, it is to be feared, had no satisfactory response from the recipients of the letters which after their many adventures I have now had the privilege of exhibiting to you, and which I think serve to illustrate the truth of Dr. Johnson’s dictum: “Goldsmith was a man of such variety of powers and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing: a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint and easy without weakness.”