And never did a wise one.”
In expressing these opinions, Dr. Johnson seems to forget what he himself has elsewhere said, very justly—to the effect that a great deal of the truth and correctness of a sentiment is sacrificed to the point of it. He also says, amusingly enough—“Goldsmith should not be always attempting to shine in conversation,” (certainly not—this would be a sort of contumacy in Johnson’s presence!) “he has not temper for it.” (Johnson’s own was of such a meek, philosophic stamp!) Even when the dignity of Goldsmith’s doings was more questionable than that of his sayings or writings, the doctor could not help entertaining some little pique. When Oliver had chastised Evans, the publisher, for printing some offensive observations, Johnson remarked to his fidus Achates: “Why, sir, this is the first time he has beaten; he may have been beaten before. This is a new pleasure to him.” He alluded to a white-bait dinner at Blackwall, where Goldsmith, denouncing obscene novels and the indelicacies of Tristram Shandy, created a warm argument among the feasters, whence they fell into personalities; then into an uproar, and thence to fisticuffs, in the midst of which, it is said, Oliver got a smart share of what was going—before they broke up this feast of reason—pretty fairly expressed by the Irish participles, bait, beating, beaten! The affair was very laughable, to be sure. But Johnson should have remembered that he himself had knocked his own publisher down—Osborne. He should have commented more leniently on poor Goldie. The old feuds between authors and publishers were as lively in those times as they were before or have been since. Goldsmith wrote a very dignified public letter, to justify the beating, and showed that there were certain rascalities which called for the imposition of violent hands upon them, and that the punishment of them was sanctioned by the sense of society, though against the letter of the law. But, as we were saying, Johnson permitted himself on many occasions to disparage Goldsmith. Still, in the main, he has stood up strongly for the fame of his friend—thereby showing that such opinions as the foregoing were not very just or generous. When his conscience got the better of his occasional feelings, as was usually the case—for his nature was intrinsically good (he “had nothing of the bear but the skin,” as Goldsmith used to say,) he would do Oliver justice. In this, to be sure, he had a consoling sense of the superiority and patronage which belong to such a championship; and, in maintaining the cause of his friend, he could argue vigorously for himself—for, their fortunes were very much alike. He could express his own feelings of scorn for the conventions or misconceptions of society, in defending the character of a man of genius. Be this as it may, he has left on record sentiments highly honorable to himself as well as to Goldsmith; and has had some of them graven in his epitaph on the poet, dramatist and historian
“Who ran
Through each mode of the pen and was master of all.”
Goldsmith, in society, was not the oddity he is represented to be by Boswell, Walpole and the others. There is no such contradictory monster as they would have us think him. The man who was “inspired” with such true genius—who drew the Vicar of Wakefield—could not have been the “idiot” that the artificial Walpole would depict him. Nor could any man who “wrote like an angel” ever come to “talk like poor Poll,” as Garrick says with such antithetical fallacy. The fact was, Oliver’s broad Westmeath accent, his stammering mode of speaking, and the careless impulses of his thoroughly Irish temperament gave his manners a strange, it may be said an intolerable originality, in an age of forms and observances in literature and life. It was only in a stiff, artificial age, like that in which his lot was cast, that Goldsmith would have been so rudely treated and ridiculed. It is felt that it was not Julian but the polished Antiochans which were ridiculous. We also know that though they laughed at Socrates he was not laughed at, as he himself expresses it. Absurdity was the cant word of Goldsmith’s day for the good-nature, generosity, originality and independence which he brought with him, along with that Shibboleth of his from the simple and honorable home of his childhood, and which he never lost in all the mazes and trials of the great metropolis.
His absurdities, as they termed them, did not, after all, prevent Goldsmith from being well received in the best society of London—a very strong proof, in itself, that the doctor was as much a gentleman in demeanor as he was by his birth and education, and could mingle with the polite and the fashionable on very easy terms and without any violence to his habits. His sayings in company—such as have been remembered—are full of point and pleasantry, and show that he could command, even with his shy utterance, much of the happy spirit of his written style. He was once explaining to a friend, in Johnson’s presence, that in fables where inferior creatures are interlocutors, these should be made to speak in character—that animals on land, for instance, should converse differently from little fishes. This idea, which is, after all, only that which Shakspeare has so beautifully realized, with a difference, in his elves of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, his Caliban and his Ariel, set Johnson a-chuckling at its childishness, which Goldsmith perceiving, he retorted very happily—laughing, too—“You may laugh, doctor, but if you had to make little fishes speak, they would talk like whales!” A palpable hit at the sesquipedalian moralist.
If we come to consider Goldsmith’s influence upon the literary character of his age, we will probably agree that it was second to that of no other author. Indeed, it must be considered superior to that of him who was supposed to sway most authoritatively the world of letters. Doctor Johnson’s style, to be sure, was very impressive, and created a host of imitators—the most remarkable of whom was Gibbon, who surpassed his model in a certain measured splendor of rhetoric—which is, nevertheless, very wearisome at times. But Goldsmith’s many modes of a very simple and lucid style produced then, and since, a more permanent effect. He wrote the best poem, the best comedy, the best novel, and the best history—at least, the best written history of the day. Johnson preferred his historic manner to that of Hume or Robertson. Though Goldsmith’s literature had not the marked effect of Doctor Johnson’s grand Latin idiom; yet being more varied, it reached the wider popularity, such as time has confirmed and increased. Goldsmith kept to the ancient ways of the vernacular, trod by Addison, Swift, Hume, etc.; and contributed not a little to neutralize the Johnsonian mode—which, after all, was recognized to be a corrupt rhetoric, and a weakening of the genius of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. Goldsmith’s, “racy of the soil,” was secured against fluctuations of taste, and the charm of it is as fresh to-day as it was eighty years ago. His comedies abolished the mawkish sentimentality which—derived partly from the Richardson school—dulled the spirit of the stage, and asserted, very happily, the old comic claim of setting audiences in a roar. The change was heartily welcomed; the Londoners crowded to the comedy to be merry, and a respected household tradition, now especially recalled for the sake of the dear old narrator of it, has more than once informed us how George the Third, his fresh-colored English face, full of merriment, and the plain, little cock-nosed Charlotte by his side, in the royal box, both joined in the hilarity of the audience during one of the first performances of “She Stoops to Conquer,” at Covent Garden Theatre; but, at the story of “Old Grouse in the Gun-room,” where everybody laughed on the stage, his majesty fairly chimed in with Mr. Hardcastle, and laughed as loud as any one in the house. Thus, in the words of Mr. Colman—
“Thus, cheered, at length, by Pleasantry’s bright ray,
Nature and mirth resumed their legal sway,
And Goldsmith’s genius basked in open day.”