CHAPTER IV
LONDON
Young Oliver Goldsmith, diffident and with no adroitness of address, was not one of those authors who can take publishers by storm, and fame with a wave of the hand. He was a nervous man. Although one of the most collected of writers, he had to be fully at his ease before, in conversation or the common intercourse of society, he could be himself and reveal that force of mind and invincibility of personality that mark his influence and creates his charm. He knew and felt his weakness. When Johnson narrated his adventures in a close and friendly gossip with the King, Goldsmith said:
"Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should have done, for I should have bowed and stammered through the whole of it."
Goldsmith's face must have shone in moments of animation, its very ugliness gaining a beauty all its own, more lovable for that transformation one smile creates. He may have had an uncouth appearance and an awkward bearing. The charm and gentleness of such a spirit as his must have outweighed accidents of form. Now we associate an inevitable purity and tenderness with him and with all he ever did. If he had a poor outward mien and fashion, men must have thought nothing of this compared to the inward grace of the heart and love-illumined soul of the man.
Alone in London, he had come to his fierce fight: not for fame, but for bread. Through all his squalid wanderings in the hard times, and all his sordid trials, he sustained his cheerfulness, and in a selfless supremacy ever strove to bestow on other lives the faith and courage his own bright heart never wholly lost. How he lived in these early days in London no one knows, and the tale of want, care, and humiliation incident to gnawing peril and privation made a story too agonising for him, open as he was, ever to fully reveal. He said one day very quietly: "When I lived among the beggars in Axe Lane."
He may have laughed as he said the words. He must have shuddered. The laugh was a selfless sacrifice. The shudder was real and to the very last too true, for painful memory was vivid. We cannot tell whether, like Shakespeare, he held the reins of horses, standing outside taverns and theatres; or whether he carried bags for pence, ran errands, gambled for his bread, or begged for shelter. Here was a sweet, weak, pure, and gentle, sympathetic lad, only a boy in heart and strength, and not even a child in that hardness life demands, stepping he knew not whither, meeting the world in an actual and visible solitude, and a loneliness of soul beyond the force of words to tell. There are those who, having passed their twentieth year, are already men of mark and power. Not such a one was poor Noll. Through ceaseless dependence and uncertainty in both his purpose and his position in life, he tardily gained that dignity and validity that attends the realisation of man's estate.
With Goldsmith now one eager and despairing quest for work followed hard upon another, and disappointments in rapid and relentless succession. After wandering on from door to door, and hope to its scattering, and chance to its dispelling, he obtained his first situation as a dispenser in a chemist's shop. He lost opportunities and failed to create confidence, more than anything through the forlornness of his appearance, and the too obvious simplicity of his bearing. Then he heard of an old friend, a warm-hearted Edinburgh student, a certain Dr. Sleigh. To this generous man he bent his steps. As soon as he was recognized, he was received into the home of his former companion, and welcomed with all that brotherliness of which sterling friendship is capable.
The old apothecary, with whom Goldsmith worked as a dispenser for a time, deserves the grateful honour that we now can pay his kindly heart. His name was Jacobs. He appears to have been an old man of benign mien and inclination. He recognized the superior learning and credentials of his young assistant. He thought that a qualified doctor should not be serving drugs in a shop, but in greater dignity visiting his patients. Largely through this man's kindly exertions, and also with a little help from Dr. Sleigh, who soon left London and was lost to his former friend, and with the sympathy and good wishes of more than one old Edinburgh comrade, remembered and met again, Goldsmith was set up in a mean and meagre manner as a physician, in a very poor and dingy neighbourhood—Bank Side, Southwark. The whole prospect was neither pleasant nor propitious. Hidden in his desolute obscurity, friends lost, for a time at all events, all thought of Goldsmith. The poor doctor soon seemed quite alone, and, what was worse, forgotten.
From the moment that Oliver Goldsmith entered London, penury and meanness had dogged his steps. It is piteous to dwell upon these squalid scenes. We need not recall the second-hand wardrobe that decked him out as a physician in this practice, unimaginably poor and dark and dingy. Fancy cannot conceive a greater dreariness or deeper destitution. He was so poor that his poorest patients felt compassion for his even greater poverty. Seeing one day his doctor's pockets bulging with papers, so that he looked like the man of letters in a then clever and popular caricature, an invalid, a journeyman printer, who had sought this physician's aid and advice, now feelingly commended him to Samuel Richardson, his own master and employer, with at first, at all events, apparently auspicious results. Leaving his dubious practice, Goldsmith became proof reader to the printer, publisher, and novelist who had also in his own good time befriended the great Dr. Johnson. No ultimate advantage, however, accrued to Goldsmith from this distinguished association with and employment by one of the most successful authors of the day.