In the morning when master Oliver expected to part for ever with that guinea in his pocket, he learned the actual state of things and left no poorer than he came, but all the richer for the laughter and the merriment and the good wishes of the friends, who, to divert and amuse both him and themselves, had treated their guest so well.
In Trinity College, at the time when Goldsmith studied there as a sizar, menial offices were involved in this dubious position. Amongst these were sweeping the courts in the morning, carrying up the dishes from the kitchen to the Fellows' table, waiting for dinner until all the rest had finished, and wearing a garb to signalise inferiority and degradation. Common manliness cannot suffer indignities of this sort. Johnson at Oxford and Goldsmith in Dublin rebelled. The agonised sense of decent justice could not be stifled. In such contexts, only cowards can wish dishonour borne and indignation unrevealed. Oliver himself had none of those conventional prejudices that raise Universities to fetishes. Like the man he was, he would have been content to enter some true trade.
His relatives had other thoughts. That faithful clergyman, his uncle Contarine, persuaded his nephew into those paths of decorous ignorance in which the ranks of the respectable tread their gentle way, and are not rude enough to question custom. He in his time had been a sizar, and had not found the duties devolving lowering or an impediment, as he said, to intimacy and association with the great and good. The reason why Goldsmith's career at Dublin was not radiant was dogging poverty. In the midst of penury no sooner was money in his pockets than silver and copper sped in response to any petition made upon his unfailing if not unerring charity.
The poor fellow gave the very clothing from his bed. In the anguish of pity, giving blankets, and sleeping cold and being laughed at and scorned, involved the warranty of self-suffering upon the eager deed. The lad lived in utter misery through the brutal tyranny of his tutor, Wilder, a dissolute drunkard, a disgrace to his own times and incomprehensible to ours. Death overtook this man in a drunken brawl. His crimes were not without attenuating circumstances. College tutors have trials enough to crush their characters, when they have characters to crush.
Living in actual need as far as money was concerned, and a destitution of interest more to be pitied, Oliver passed in obscurity through the University. The Rev. Charles Goldsmith, dying in 1747, made the position of his son even more precarious and pathetic, and a career of mishap and misunderstanding still harder to endure. We find dear Noll failing in scholarships, or losing through mere negligence the prizes he had gained, and, lastly, with a philosophic indifference to the transitory nature of mortal learning, pawning the books he ought to have studied. It was a doleful business. He had, as he said, "a knack of hoping." It must have been a clever trick, for it never quite failed. He wrote ballads that were bought up eagerly, and merrily sung, cheering the poor in the common streets of Dublin. He made a shilling or two now and then upon these transactions. These, we can imagine, brought him more pride and pleasure than academic prowess could have afforded. One night he gave a supper to his friends, who were all of a lively and hilarious order, and was for this, before his assembled guests, thrashed by his tutor for his breach of college discipline. Selling his remaining books and his clothes, he fled from this scene of many sorrows. At Dublin, Goldsmith's diligence, however faulty, was enough to gain for him commendation from time to time, but no distinction worth mentioning. His worst crime is seen in a riot in which he was not a ringleader. He scraped into his scrapes as he scraped through his examinations.
These days were most desolate. His flight was not final. Reconciled to his condition, he graduated in 1749, his name as usual the last upon the list. When, later in life, he penned his Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning, he wrote from bitter experience. Allied with Johnson in the feeling of humiliation at the position of a sizar in a College, Goldsmith went further, and questioned the whole policy of education at our schools and Universities. It is hardly too much to hold him one of the pioneers of modern methods, and those new, slowly-growing principles, which mark our present somewhat broader enlightenment.
Leaving the University, and returning to his mother's house at Ballymahon, Goldsmith loafed about lazily, good-humouredly, and merrily, taking things just as they came. To bear with him in patience was hard for the members of his family. Our young, dreaming, and delightful poet may not have been a blessing at home. Another hearth saw this minstrel in his happiest vein. Passing his evenings at an inn, he gleaned there a knowledge of mankind of which in later years he made capital use. In time a finer audience than that he cheered at this village ale-house, greeted a fairer humour when this tavern, immortalised in happy memory, was seen in She Stoops to Conquer. At this village hostelry, merriment, and not indulgence, ruled delighted hours. In this haven of hilarity Oliver sang ditties and told stories that blessed his boon companions. One recalls Shenstone's words:
"Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn."
It may seem difficult to discover a hero rejoicing in comrades discovered in a village ale-house. Still less should we expect to find in a heart pleased so easily a man of refined and exquisite sensibility. Oliver Goldsmith, revelling in friends coarse and crass to superficial vision, must have found in them gleams of holiness that lives less loving could not discern.