A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

And then he would stare at the gammon in the rafter and mutter some words, burst into a roar of laughter, and stumble upstairs to his writing, leaving the good woman to thank Heaven that she was the wife of a substantial farmer and not of an unsubstantial gentleman of letters, who could not carry on a simple conversation without having some queer thought fly across his brain for all the world like one of the swallows on the water at Hendon, only maybe a deal harder to catch. She knew that the gentleman had hurried to his paper and ink to complete the capture of that fleet-flitting thought which had come to him when he had cast his eyes toward the gammon, though how an idea worth putting on paper—after a few muttered words and a laugh—could lurk about a common piece of hog's-flesh was a mystery to her.

And then upon occasions the gentleman would take a walk abroad; the farmer's son had more than once come upon him strolling about the fields with his hands in his pockets and his head bent toward the ground, still muttering fitfully and occasionally giving a laugh that made the grey pad in the paddock look up slowly, still munching the grass. Now and again he paid a visit to his friend Mr. Hugh Boyd at the village of Kenton, and once he returned late at night from such a visit, without his shoes. He had left them in a quagmire, he said, and it was only with a struggle that he saved himself from being engulfed as well. That was the story of his shoes which young Selby remembered when he was no longer young. And there was another story which he remembered, but it related to his slippers. The fact was that the gentleman had acquired the bad habit of reading in bed, and the table on which his candlestick stood being several feet away from his pillow, he saved himself the trouble of rising to extinguish it by flinging a slipper at it. In the morning the overturned candle was usually found side by side on the floor with an unaccountably greasy slipper. This method of discharging an important domestic duty differed considerably from Johnson's way of compassing the same end. Johnson, being extremely short-sighted, was compelled to hold the candle close to the book when reading in bed, so that he had no need to use his slipper as an extinguisher. No, but he found his pillow very handy for this purpose. When he had finished his reading he threw away the book and went asleep with his candle under his pillow.

The gentleman at the farm went about a good deal in his slippers, and with his shirt loose at the collar—the latter must have been but one of his very customary negligences, or Sir Joshua Reynolds would not have painted him thus. Doubtless the painter had for long recognised the interpretative value of this loosened collar above that of the velvet and silk raiment in which the man sometimes appeared before the wondering eyes of his friends.

But if the painter had never had an opportunity of studying the picturesqueness of his negligence, he had more than one chance of doing so within the farmhouse.

Young Selby recollected that upon at least one occasion Sir Joshua, his friend Sir William Chambers, and Dr. Johnson had paid a visit to the gentleman who lodged at the farm. He remembered that for that reception of so distinguished a company the farmhouse parlour had been opened and tea provided. There must have been a good deal of pleasant talk between the gentleman and his friends at this time, and probably young Selby heard an astonishingly loud laugh coming from the enormous visitor with the brown coat and the worsted stockings, as the gentleman endeavoured to tell his guests something of the strange scenes which he was introducing in the comedy he was writing in that room upstairs. It was then a comedy without a name, but young Selby heard that it was produced the following year in London and that it was called She Stoops to Conquer.

This was the second year that the gentleman had spent at the farm. The previous summer he had been engaged on another work which was certainly as comical as the comedy. It was called Animated Nature, and it comprised some of the most charmingly narrated errors in Natural History ever offered to the public, and the public have always been delighted to read pages of fiction if it is only called “Natural History.” This is one of the best-established facts in the history of the race. After all, Animated Nature was true to half its title: every page was animated.

It was while he was so engaged, with one eye on Buffon and another on his MS., that he found Farmer Selby very useful to him. Farmer Selby knew a great deal about animals—the treatment of horses under various conditions, and the way to make pigs pay; he had probably his theories respecting the profit to be derived from keeping sheep, and how to feed oxen that are kept for the plough. All such knowledge he must have placed at the disposal of the author, though the farmer was possibly too careless an observer of the simple incidents of the fields to be able to verify Buffon's statement, reproduced in Animated Nature, to the effect that cows shed their horns every two years; he was probably also too deficient in the spirit in which a poet sets about the work of compilation to be able to assent to the belief that a great future was in store for the zebra when it should become tame and perform the ordinary duties of a horse. But if the author was somewhat discouraged in his speculations now and again by Farmer Selby, he did not allow his fancy as a naturalist to be wholly repressed. He had heard a story of an ostrich being ridden horsewise in some regions, and of long journeys being accomplished in this way in incredibly short spaces of time, and forthwith his imagination enabled him to see the day when this bird would become as amenable to discipline as the barn-door fowl, though discharging the tasks of a horse, carrying its rider across England with the speed of a racer!

It was while he was engaged on this pleasant work of fancy and imagination that Mr. Boswell paid him a visit, bringing with him as a witness Mr. Mickle, the translator of the Lusiad. “The Gentleman” had gone away for the day, Mrs. Selby explained; but she did not know Mr. Boswell. She could not prevent him from satisfying his curiosity in respect of Dr. Goldsmith. He went upstairs to his room, and he was fully satisfied. He found the walls all scrawled over with outline drawings of quite a number of animals. Having thus satisfied himself that the author of Animated Nature was working in a thoroughly conscientious manner he came away. He records the incident himself, but he does not say whether or not he was able to recognise any of the animals from their pictures.

But now it was a professed and not an unconscious comedy that occupied Dr. Goldsmith. Whatever disappointment he may have felt at the indifferent success of the first performance of The Good-Natured Man—and he undoubtedly felt some—had been amply redeemed by the money which accrued to him from the “author's rights” and the sale of the play; and he had only awaited a little encouragement from the managers to enable him to begin another comedy. But the managers were not encouraging, and he was found by his friends one day to be full of a scheme for the building of a new theatre for the production of new plays, in order that the existing managers might not be able to carry on their tyranny any longer. Such a scheme has been revived every decade since Goldsmith's time, but never with the least success. Johnson, whose sound sense was rarely at fault, laughed at the poet's project for bringing down the mighty from their seats, upon which Goldsmith cried: “Ay, sir, this matter may be nothing to you who can now shelter yourself behind the corner of your pension,” and he doubtless went on to describe the condition of the victims of the tyranny of which he complained; but it is questionable if his doing so effected more than to turn Johnson's laughter into another and a wider channel.

But Goldsmith spoke feelingly. He was certainly one of the ablest writers of the day, but no pension was ever offered to him, though on every hand bounties were freely bestowed on the most indifferent and least deserving of authors—men whose names were forgotten before the end of the century, and during the lifetime of the men themselves remembered only by the pay clerk to the almoner.