Goldsmith wrote two plays, both hearty comedies. The less successful, The Good-Natured Man (acted 1768), brought him in £500. His next play, She Stoops to Conquer, a comedy of manners, is a landmark in the history of the drama. The taste of the age demanded regular, vapid, sentimental plays. Here was a comedy that disregarded the conventions and presented in quick succession a series of hearty humorous scenes. Even the manager of the theater predicted the failure of the play; but from the time of its first appearance in 1773, this comedy of manners has had an unbroken record of triumphs. A century later it ran one hundred nights in London. Authorities say that it has never been performed without success, not even by amateurs. Like all of Goldsmith's best productions, it was based on actual experience. In his young days a wag directed him to a private house for an inn. Goldsmith went there and with much flourish gave his orders for entertainment. The subtitle of the comedy is The Mistakes of a Night; and the play shows the situations which developed when its hero, Tony Lumpkin, sent two lovers to a pretended inn, which was really the home of the young ladies to be wooed.
It is interesting to note that his contemporary, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), produced, shortly after the great success of She Stoops to Conquer, the only other eighteenth-century comedies that retain their popularity, The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), which contributed still further to the overthrow of the sentimental comedy of the age.
General Characteristics.—Goldsmith is a romanticist at heart; but he felt the strong classical influences of Johnson and of the earlier school. In his poetry, Goldsmith used classical couplets and sometimes classical subject matter, but the didactic parts of his poems are the poorest. His greatest successes, such as the pictures of the village preacher and the schoolmaster in The Deserted Village and of Dr. Primrose and his family in The Vicar of Wakefield, show the warm human sympathy of the romantic school.
The qualities for which he is most noted are (1) a sane and saving altruistic philosophy of life, pervaded with rare humor, and (2) a style of remarkable ease, grace, and clearness, expressed in copious and apt language.
She Stoops to Conquer marks a change in the drama of the time, because, in Dobson's phrase, it bade "good-bye to sham Sentiment."
"…this play it appears
Dealt largely in laughter and nothing in tears."
SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784
[Illustration: SAMUEL JOHNSON. From the painting by Sir Joshua
Reynolds.]
[Illustration: SAMUEL JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE. From an old print.]
Early Struggles.—Michael Johnson, an intelligent bookseller in Lichfield, Staffordshire, was in 1709 blessed with a son who was to occupy a unique position in literature, a position gained not so much by his writings as by his spoken words and great personality.