Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 16

by Unknown

In 1754 he is studying, or pretending to study, at Leyden. In 1755 and 1756 he is singing, fluting, and otherwise "beating" his way through Europe, whence he returns with a mythical M. B. degree. From 1756 to 1759 he is in London, teaching, serving an apothecary, practicing medicine, reading proof, writing as a hack, planning to practice surgery in Coromandel, failing to qualify as a hospital mate, and in general only not starving. In 1759 Dr. Percy finds him in Green Arbor Court amid a colony of washerwomen, writing an 'Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.' Next follows the appearance of that work, and his acquaintance with publishers and men of letters. In 1761, with Percy, comes Johnson to visit him. In 1764 Goldsmith is one of the members of the famous Literary Club, where he counts among his friends, besides Percy and Johnson, Reynolds, Boswell, Garrick, Burke, and others who shone with their own or reflected light. The rest of his life, spent principally in or near London, is associated with his literary career. He died April 4th, 1774, and was buried near the Temple Church.

Goldsmith was an essayist and critic, a story-writer, a poet, a comic dramatist, and a literary drudge: the last all the time, the others "between whiles." His drudgery produced such works as the 'Memoirs of Voltaire,' the 'Life of Nash,' two Histories of England, Histories of Rome and Greece, Lives of Parnell and Bolingbroke. The 'History of Animated Nature' was undertaken as an industry, but it reads, as Johnson said, "like a Persian tale,"—and of course, the more Persian the less like nature. For the prose of Goldsmith writing for a suit of clothes or for immortality is all of a piece, inimitable. "Nothing," says he, in his 'Essay on Taste,' "has been so often explained, and yet so little understood, as simplicity in writing.... It is no other than beautiful nature, without affectation or extraneous ornament."

This ingenuous elegance is the accent of Goldsmith's work in verse and prose. It is nature improved, not from without but by exquisite and esoteric art, the better to prove its innate virtue and display its artless charm. Such a style is based upon a delicate "sensibility to the graces of natural and moral beauty and decorum." Hence the ideographic power, the directness, the sympathy, the lambent humor that characterize the 'Essays,' the 'Vicar,' the 'Deserted Village,' and 'She Stoops to Conquer.' This is the "plain language of ancient faith and sincerity" that, pretending to no novelty, renovated the prose of the eighteenth century, knocked the stilts from under Addison and Steele, tipped half the Latinity out of Johnson, and readjusted his ballast. Goldsmith goes without sprawling or tiptoeing; he sails without rolling. He borrows the carelessness but not the ostentation of the Spectator; the dignity but not the ponderosity of 'Rasselas'; and produces the prose of natural ease, the sweetest English of the century. It in turn prefaced the way for Charles Lamb, Hunt, and Sydney Smith. "It were to be wished that we no longer found pleasure with the inflated style," writes Goldsmith in his 'Polite Learning.' "We should dispense with loaded epithet and dressing up trifles with dignity.... Let us, instead of writing finely, try to write naturally; not hunt after lofty expressions to deliver mean ideas, nor be forever gaping when we only mean to deliver a whisper."

Just this naturalness constitutes the charm of the essay on 'The Bee' (1759), and of the essays collected in 1765. We do not read him for information: whether he knows more or less of his subject, whether he writes of Charles XII., or Dress, The Opera, Poetry, or Education, we read him for simplicity and humor. Still, his critical estimates, while they may not always square with ours, evince not only good sense and æsthetic principle, but a range of reading not at all ordinary. When he condemns Hamlet's great soliloquy we may smile, but in judicial respect for the father of our drama he yields to none of his contemporaries. The selections that he includes in his 'Beauties of English Poetry' would argue a conventional taste; but in his 'Essay on Poetry Distinguished from the Other Arts,' he not only defines poetry in terms that might content the Wordsworthians, he also to a certain extent anticipates Wordsworth's estimate of poetic figures.

While he makes no violent breach with the classical school, he prophesies the critical doctrine of the nineteenth century. He calls for the "energetic language of simple nature, which is now grown into disrepute." "If the production does not keep nature in view, it will be destitute of truth and probability, without which the beauties of imitation cannot subsist." Still he by no means falls into the quagmire of realism. For, continues he, "if on the other hand the imitation is so close as to be mistaken for nature, the pleasure will then cease, because the [Greek: mimêsis] or imitation, no longer appears."

Even when wrong, Goldsmith is generally half-way right; and this is especially true of the critical judgments contained in his first published book. The impudence of 'The Enquiry' (1759) is delicious. What this young Irishman, fluting it through Europe some five years before, had not learned about the 'Condition of Polite Learning' in its principal countries, might fill a ponderous folio. What he did learn, eked out with harmless misstatement, flashes of inspiration, and a clever argument to prove that criticism has always been the foe of letters, managed to fill a respectable duodecimo, and brought him to the notice of publishers and scholars.

The essay has catholicity, independence, and wit, and it carries itself with whimsical ease. Every sentence steps out sprightly. Of the French Encyclopédies: "Wits and dunces contribute their share, and Diderot as well as Desmaretz are candidates for oblivion. The genius of the first supplies the gale of favor, and the latter adds the useful ballast of stupidity." Of the Germans: "They write through volumes, while they do not think through a page.... Were angels to write books, they never would write folios." And again: "If criticism could have improved the taste of a people, the Germans would have been the most polite nation alive." That settles the Encyclopedias and the Germans. So each nationality is sententiously reviewed and dismissed with an epigram that even to-day sounds not altogether unjust, rather amusing and urbane than acrimonious.

But it was not until Goldsmith began the series of letters in the Public Ledger (1760), that was afterwards published as 'The Citizen of the World' that he took London. These letters purport to be from a philosophic Chinaman in Europe to his friends at home. Grave, gay, serene, ironical, they were at once an amusing image and a genial censor of current manners and morals. They are no less creative than critical; equally classic for the characters they contain: the Gentleman in Black, Beau Tibbs and his wife, the pawnbroker's widow, Tim Syllabub, and the procession of minor personages, romantic or ridiculous, but unique,—equally classic for these characters and for the satire of the conception. These are Goldsmith's best sketches. Though the prose is not always precise, it seems to be clear, and is simple. The writer cares more for the judicious than the sublime; for the quaint, the comic, and the agreeable than the pathetic. He chuckles with sly laughter—genial, sympathetic; he looses his arrow phosphorescent with wit, but not barbed, dipped in something subacid,—straight for the heart. Not Irving alone, but Thackeray, stands in line of descent from the Goldsmith of the 'Citizen.'

'The Traveller,' polished ad unguem, appeared in 1764, and placed Goldsmith in the first rank of poets then living; but of that later. There is good reason for believing that his masterpiece in prose, 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' had been written as early as 1762, although it was not published until 1766. It made Goldsmith's mark as a storyteller. One can readily imagine how, after the grim humor of Smollett, the broad and risqué realism of Fielding, the loitering of Sterne, and the moralizing of Richardson, the public would seize with a sense of relief upon this unpretentious chronicle of a country clergyman's life: his peaceful home, its ruin, its restoration. Not because the narrative was quieter and simpler, shorter and more direct than other narratives, but because to its humor, realism, grace, and depth it added the charity of First Corinthians Thirteenth. England soon discovered that the borders of the humanities had been extended; that the Vicar and his "durable" wife, Moses, Olivia with the prenatal tendency to romance, Sophia, the graceless Jenkinson,—the habit and temper of the whole,—were a new province. The prose idyl, with all its beauty and charity, does not entitle Goldsmith to rank with the great novelists; but of its kind, in spite of faults of inaccuracy, improbability, and impossibility, it is first and best. Goethe read and re-read it with moral and æsthetic benefit; and the spirit of Goldsmith is not far to seek in 'Hermann and Dorothea.' 'The Vicar' is perhaps the most popular of English classics in foreign lands.

In poetry, if Goldsmith did not write much, it was for lack of opportunity. What he did write is good, nearly all of it. The philosophy of 'The Traveller' (1764) and the political economy of 'The Deserted Village' (1770) may be dubious, but the poetry is true. There is in both a heartiness which discards the formalized emotion, prefers the touch of nature and the homely adjective. The characteristic is almost feminine in the description of Auburn: "Dear lovely bowers"; it is inevitable, artless, in 'The Traveller': "His first, best country ever is at home." But on the other hand, the curiosa felicitas marks every line, the nice selection of just the word or phrase richest in association, redolent of tradition, harmonious, classically proper, but still natural, true, and apt. "My heart untravell'd fondly turns to thee"—not a word but is hearty; and for all that, the line is stamped with the academic authority of centuries: "Coelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt." Both poems are characterized by the infrequency of epithet and figure,—the infrequency that marks sincerity and that heightens pleasure,—and by a cunning in the use of proper names, resonant, remote, suggestive: "On Idra's cliffs or Arno's shelvy side,"—the cunning of a musical poem. Both poems vibrate with personality, recall the experience of the writer. It would be hard to choose between them; but 'The Deserted Village' strikes the homelier chord, comes nearer, with its natural pathos, its sidelong smile, and its perennial novelty, to the heart of him who knows.