A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

Even before he is known to fame, and familiar only with famine, he is visited in his garret by Dr. Percy, a member of the great Northumberland family at whose town house he lived. So much for the empty-headed fool who never opened his mouth except to put his foot in it, as a countryman of his said about quite another person. He was a shallow prig, and yet when “the Club” was started not one of the original members questioned his right to a place among the most fastidious of the community, although Garrick—to the shame of Johnson be it spoken—was not admitted for nine years. Boswell—to the shame of Johnson be it spoken—was allowed to crawl in after an exclusion of ten. According to his numerous detractors, this Goldsmith was one of the most objectionable persons possible to imagine, and yet we find him the closest friend of the greatest painter of the day and the greatest actor of the day. He associates with peers on the friendliest terms, and is the idol of their daughters. He is accused, on the one hand, of aiming at being accounted a Macaroni and being extravagant in his dress, and yet he has such a reputation for slovenliness in this respect that it is recorded that Dr. Johnson, who certainly never was accused of harbouring unworthy aspirations to be accounted a beau, made it a point of putting on his best garments—he may even have taken the extreme step of fastening up his garters—before visiting Goldsmith, in order, as he explained, that the latter might have no excuse for his slovenliness. We are also told that Goldsmith made a fool of himself when he got on his feet to make a speech, and yet it is known that he travelled through Europe, winning the hospitality of more than one university by the display of his skill as a disputant. Again, none of his innumerable traits of awkwardness is so widely acknowledged as his conversational, and yet the examples which survive of his impromptu wit are of the most finished type; and (even when the record is made by Boswell), when he set himself out to take opposite sides to Johnson, he certainly spoke better sense than his antagonist, though he was never so loud. It is worth noting that nearly all the hard things which Johnson is reported to have said respecting Goldsmith were spoken almost immediately after one of these disputes. Further, we are assured that Goldsmith's learning was of the shallowest order, and yet when he was appointed Professor of History to the Royal Academy we do not hear that any voice was raised in protest.

What is a simple reader to think when brought face to face with such contradictory accounts of the man and his attainments? Well, possibly the best one can do is to say, as Fanny Burney did, that Goldsmith was an extraordinary man.

Of course, so far as his writings are concerned there is no need for one to say much. They speak for themselves, and readers can form their own opinion on every line and every sentence that has come from his pen. There is no misunderstanding the character of The Traveller or The Deserted Village or The Vicar of Wakefield. These are acknowledged by the whole world to be among the most precious legacies of the eighteenth century to posterity. Who reads nowadays, except out of curiosity, such classics as Tristram Shandy, Clarissa Harlow, Evelina, or Rasselas? But who has not read, and who does not still read for pleasure, The Vicar of Wakefield? Johnson's laborious poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, now only exists as an example of the last gasp of the didactic in verse; but we cannot converse without quoting—sometimes unconsciously—from The Deserted Village When the actor-manager of a theatre wishes to show how accomplished a company he has at his disposal he produces She Stoops to Conquer, and he would do so more frequently only he is never quite able to make up his mind whether he himself should play the part of old Hardcastle, Tony Lumpkin, Young Marlow, or Diggory. But what other eighteenth-century comedy of all produced previous to the death of Goldsmith can any manager revive nowadays with any hope of success? Colman of the eighteenth century is as dead as Congreve of the seventeenth; and what about the masterpieces of Cumberland, and Kelly, and Whitehead, and the rest? What about the Rev. Mr. Home's Douglas, which, according to Dr. Johnson, was equal to Shakespeare at his best? They have all gone to the worms, and these not even bookworms—their very graves are neglected. But She Stoops to Conquer is never revived without success—never without a modern audience recognising the fact that its characters are not the puppets of the playwright, but the creations of Nature. It is worthy of mention, too, that the play which first showed the capacity of an actress whose name was ever at the head of the list of actresses of the last generation, was founded on The Vicar of Wakefield. It was Miss Ellen Terry's appearance in Olivia in 1878 that brought about her connection with the ever memorable Lyceum management as an associate of the greatest actor of our day.

These things speak for themselves, and prove incontestably that Goldsmith was head and shoulders above all those writers with whom he was on intimate terms. But the mystery of the contradictory accounts which we have of the man himself and his ways remains as unsolved as ever.

Yes, unless we assume one thing, namely—that the majority of the people about him were incapable of understanding him. Is it going too far to suggest that, as Daniel Defoe was sent to the pillory because his ironic jest in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters was taken in earnest, and as good people shuddered at the horrible proposal of Swift that Irish babies should be cooked and eaten, so Goldsmith's peculiarities of humour were too subtle to be in any degree appreciated by most of the people with whom he came in contact in England?

In Ireland there would be no chance of his being misunderstood; for there no form that his humour assumed would be regarded as peculiar. Irony is a figure of speech so largely employed by the inhabitants in some parts that people who have lived there for any length of time have heard whole conversations carried on by two or three men without the slightest divergence from this tortuous form of expression into the straight path of commonplace English. And all this time there was no expression but one of complete gravity on the faces of the speakers; a stranger had no clue whatsoever to the game of words that was being played before him.

Another fully recognised form of humour which prevails in Ireland is even more difficult for a stranger to follow; its basis consists in mystifying another person, not for the sake of getting a laugh from a third who has been let into the secret, but simply for the satisfaction of the mystifier himself. The forms that such a scheme of humour may assume are various. One of the most common is an affectation of extraordinary stupidity. It is usually provoked by the deliverance of a platitude by a stranger. The humourist pretends that he never heard such a statement before, and asks to have it repeated. When this is done, there is usually a pause in which the profoundest thought is suggested; then the clouds are seen to clear away, and the perplexity on the man's face gives way to intelligence; he has grasped the meaning of the phrase at last, and he announces his victory with sparkling eyes, and forthwith puts quite a wrong construction upon the simplest words. His chuckling is brought to a sudden stop by the amazed protest of the victim against the suggested solution of the obvious. Thus, with consummate art, the man is led on to explain at length, with ridiculous emphasis, the exact meaning of his platitude; but it is all to no purpose. The humourist shakes his head; he pretends that the cleverness of the other is too much for him to grasp all in a moment; it's a fine thing to have learning, to be sure, but these things may be best not meddled with by ignorant creatures like himself; and so he goes off murmuring his admiration for the fine display of wisdom that comes so easy-like from the man whom he has been fooling.

This form of humour is indulged in by some Irishmen simply for the satisfaction it gives them to indulge in it. They never hurry off to acquaint a neighbour with what they have done, and they are quite pleased with the thought that the person on whom they have been imposing will tell the whole story of their extraordinary obtuseness to some one else; it never strikes them that that some one else may fail to see through the trick, and actually be convinced of the existence of their obtuseness. But if such a possibility did occur to them, they would be all the better pleased: they would feel that they had fooled two instead of one.

But, of course, the most widely recognised form of Irish humour is that known as the “bull.” This is the delivery of a paradox so obvious as to be detected—after a brief consideration—by an Englishman or even—after an additional space for thought—by a Scotsman. But where the fun comes in is (in the Irishman's eyes) when the others assume that the humour of the bull is involuntary; and this is just what the Englishman has been doing, and what the Irishman has been encouraging him to do, for centuries. The Englishman is so busy trying to make it appear that he is cleverer than he really is, he cannot see the humour of any man trying to make out that he is more stupid than he really is. Let no one fancy for a moment that the humour of an Irish bull is involuntary. It is a form of expression that may be due to a peculiar twist in the Irishman's mind—indeed, every form of humour may be said to be due to a peculiar twist of the mind—but it is as much a figure of speech as irony or satire. “Blarney” and “palaver” are other forms of speech in which the Irish of some generations ago indulged with great freedom, and both are essentially Irish and essentially humorous, though occasionally borrowed and clumsily worn on the other side of the Channel, just as the bernous of the Moor is worn by an English missionary when lecturing in the village schoolroom (with a magic-lantern) on The Progress of Christianity in Morocco.

It would be interesting to make a scientific inquiry into the origin and the maintenance of all these forms of expression among the Irish; but it is unnecessary to do so in this place. It is enough if we remind English readers of the existence of such forms even in the present day, when there is so little need for their display. It can without difficulty be understood by any one, however superficially acquainted with the history of Ireland for the past thousand years, that “blarney” and “palaver” were as necessary to the existence of the natives of the island as suspicion and vigilance were to the existence of the invaders. But it is not so apparent why Irishmen should be given to rush into the extremes of bragging on the one hand, and self-depreciation on the other. Bragging is, however, as much an endowment of Nature for the protection of a species or a race as is imitation or mimicry. The Irishman who was able by the exercise of this gift to intimidate the invaders, escaped a violent death and transmitted his art to his children. The practice of the art of self-depreciation was quite as necessary for the existence of the Irish race up to the time of the passing of the first Land Act. For several generations an Irishman was not allowed to own a horse of greater value than five pounds; and every Irish agriculturist who improved the miserable cabin which he was supposed to share with his pigs and his fowl, might rest certain that his rent would be raised out of all proportion to his improvements. In these circumstances it can easily be understood that it was accounted a successful joke for a man who was doing tolerably well to put on a poor face when in the presence of an inquiry agent of the absent landlord—to run down all his own efforts and to depreciate generally his holding, and thus to save himself from the despicable treatment which was meted out to the unfortunate people by the conquerors of their country.