There have been crowds of distinguished literary men whose peculiarities were almost as much ridiculed as those of Goldsmith, but who have found a more dignified appreciation, by virtue of fairer biographers. Socrates was laughed at more than any man in Athens. But his immortal pupil has rescued his fame from those wits and satirists who used to loiter about the porches, and go, of a morning, to applaud the Clouds of Aristophanes. Socrates was an ugly little man—in the midst of the fine-faced men of Attica—generally threadbare and slovenly; and even Plato has been obliged to allow that his honored master was like an apothecary’s gallipot, painted outside with grotesque figures, but containing balm within. He was as much laughed at as Goldsmith; but nobody can think Socrates a laughable old fellow. There was the Emperor Julian. When he sojourned at Antioch, he was ridiculed and lampooned by the citizens for his careless dress and beard, and his simple manners. Whereupon, instead of treating them as Sulla did those facetious Greeks who said “his face was a mulberry sprinkled with meal,” the philosophic apostate wrote a book against them, called “Misopogon,” in which he pleasantly satirized himself for his literary peculiarities, justified his critics, and happily admitted that he did not, indeed, resemble in any thing those witty and fashionable people who made merry at his expense. If these Antiochans were Julian’s biographers, he should cut but a silly figure in the eyes of posterity. As it is, he has hardly fared much better in another point of view. La Fontaine was voted intolerably stupid in society. The gay Parisians said he merely vegetated—and he was called the Fable Tree—bringing forth fables! Poor Burns complained that though, when he wished, he could make himself “beloved,” he could not make himself “respected.” He confessed that he wanted discretion—was prone to a lapsus linguæ, and very apt to offend the sense of the society he was in—in this, somewhat like Goldsmith. We could cite a score of instances showing that famous men have been barely tolerated in society and very much exposed to the ridicule of it. But their biographers have done their better qualities justice, and they are not remembered in any remarkable degree in connection with the peculiarities which excited the satire of their cotemporaries.
A great many things worked unfavorably for Goldsmith. His face was very plain-favored in expression, he spoke with a brogue and hesitated a little in his utterance. In his nature he was shy, and his manners in society had all the simplicity and unguarded impulse of his earlier years. Such a man, living in comparative retirement, might have passed through the world without any disparagements. But Goldsmith was thrown upon the great stage of London, and into the society of the most fastidious critics and gentlemen of the age. Here his ordeal was a severe one—as the result showed. Boswell, Hawkins, Cumberland, Northcote, Thrale and the rest of those who either wrote memoirs or furnished reminiscences of our author, have proved how little they could sympathize with the plain, blunt Irishman—who was only a simple child of nature and of genius.
Among those who have most contributed to lessen the prestige of Goldsmith’s name was James Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s literary henchman and biographer. In all that Boswell writes of Oliver he exhibits his desire to disparage him. It is true he sometimes expresses partiality for Goldsmith’s conversation. But he, doubtless, intends this as a show of frankness to obtain the more easy credence for his general opinions of the poet. One great cause of this feeling on Boswell’s part was his reverent attachment to the fame of Dr. Johnson, and his jealousy of any one who came or seemed to come into rivalry with that Ursa Major of the British literary firmament. Boswell had the little soul of a parasite, and always felt offense at any exhibition of independence toward Johnson—such having the effect of rebuking his own absurd obsequiousness. Goldsmith, though the easiest and kindliest of men, still kept up that frank, irrespective manliness of disposition which belongs to genius, and could not sympathize with Boswell’s extreme notions of worship. The poet must have felt the folly and impoliteness of trumpeting Johnson in season and out of season—often in presence of better men than the lexicographer—and must have been offended with it, too. On one occasion, indeed, he said to Boswell, with his usual point and good sense—“Sir, you are for making a monarchy of that which should be a republic.” He respected Dr. Johnson, but never bowed down to him, nor to any one else. And the son of a Scottish lord, who venerated on all-fours, could not forgive the poor Irish scholar for standing erect in presence of the grim idol—as Johnson too often was, in his austere moods. Along with all this, Boswell probably knew very well the opinion which Goldsmith had of himself. In conversation with some one who called Boswell a Scotch cur, Goldsmith remarked—“Not so—he is only a Scotch bur: Tom Davies (the publisher) threw him at Johnson and he sticks to him.” A saying which, of course, found its way to the bur’s ears. All these things are sufficient to account for the animus palpably exhibited against Goldsmith in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
When his book appeared, he was sharply and universally condemned for his treatment of the dead writer. Lord Charlemont expressed his indignant astonishment how James Boswell could affect to undervalue a man of such genius and popularity. Burke said to Lady Crewe, on the subject—“What sympathy could you expect to find, my dear madam, between an Irish poet and a Scotch lawyer?” Wilkes swore two such characters were moral antipodes. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who knew Goldsmith like a brother, and who had heard from report how Boswell meant to depict the poet, remonstrated earnestly with him on the subject before the biography of Johnson came out. Bishop Percy, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Malone and others denied that Goldsmith was guilty of the fooleries and grimaces and unworthy feelings attributed to him by Boswell, and protested against the low estimate he had made of Oliver’s genius and character. And yet with all Boswell’s earnestness in the attempt to lessen Goldsmith, it is remarkable how little he is really able to injure him in the long run. He has created an unfavorable impression of the poet’s manners it is true; but this is wearing away; and the fact is, that, not only the silly Boswell himself, but the austere doctor whom he delighted to honor, and wrote every thing to glorify, seems to be more reflected on than Goldsmith, in most things that have been recorded to the disparagement of the latter in connection with Johnson.
One of Boswell’s first anecdotes of Johnson and Goldsmith will show the paltry, parasitical spirit in which he was in the habit of making his notes and comments. They three had been supping at the Mitre tavern, when Johnson got up to go home and take tea with his blind dependent, Miss Williams. “Dr. Goldsmith,” says Bozzy, “being a privileged man, got up to go with him, strutting away and calling to me, with an air of superiority, like that of an esoteric over an exoteric disciple of a sage of antiquity, ‘I go to Miss Williams.’ ” He says he envied this “mark of distinction,” but soon had the same honor himself! Boswell always betrays himself. For, without a grain of Oliver’s genius, he shows himself to be as thoughtless and absurd as he would have us think the poet to have been. If the latter did really exhibit any thing like exultation on the occasion alluded to—the canny Scot mistook it; he could not enter into the humorous vein of the author of the Citizen of the World, who never let any opportunity of pleasantry of any kind escape him, and who, doubtless, with a playful impulse, would, slily and aside, for Boswell’s behoof, put on a comic air of loftiness, at the idea of his own privilege. Such little traits were very characteristic of Oliver Goldsmith, at all periods of his life; and neither his own dignity nor that of any one else was much thought of, whenever his funny “Cynthias of the minute” came across him. With all his respect for Dr. Johnson, he had still—though Boswell does not seem to admit it—a very strong sense of what was odd, petulant and grandiose in the doctor’s manners, and could sport with it, too, to the bear’s face, with a rare and child-like temerity. For instance, once at Jack’s Coffee-house, where the pair were dining on rumps and kidneys, Johnson said—“These rumps are pretty things; but a man must eat a great number of them.” Goldsmith assented with pleasantry, and then, under the easy, unawed impulse of his nature, and carried away by the thought that he was not at his dreary desk, but at dinner with his friend, pushed on with—“But how many of them would go to the moon?” Johnson had, doubtless, said such small matters did not go far—a common expression, which would have provoked Oliver’s pun—though the story says nothing of this.
“To the moon?” replies Johnson; “I think that exceeds your calculation.”
“Not at all, sir,” cries Goldie—looking ludicrously prepense, at the terrible, grave face opposite—“I think I could tell.”
“Well, sir,” rejoined Ursa Major; whereupon the other comes out with:
“One, if it was long enough!”
Johnson growled angrily, and said he was a fool to provoke such an answer. Not a fool, however, but a solemn bear, whose very grimness, contrasted with the absurdity of the solution, was Goldsmith’s irresistible temptation. We must, in fact, justify Oliver’s fun—though we did not see Johnson’s face. The thing was laughter-compelling. Goldsmith had no undue feeling of deference in his nature at all, though he used certainly to go on all-fours to amuse the children. His irrespective and somewhat careless humor often irritated Johnson, who generally supped full of flattery.