There I met another man
With his hat in his hand.
But in this, as in a great many other matters of literature, morals, and taste, Johnson did not prove himself an infallible doctor. Goldsmith’s taste, of a genuine vates, led him at once to appreciate the simple lyrics of Percy’s collection; and his charming ballad of the Hermit shows how he felt the fresh spirit of them. This excellent poem was written for the Countess of Northumberland. And here we may remark that three of the most attractive modern English poems were composed especially for ladies of high rank—or at their suggestion:—The Lay of the Last Minstrel, at the wish of Lady Anna Scott, daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch; The Sofa, for Lady Hesketh; and Goldsmith’s Ballad for the Countess.
Goldsmith certainly took the initiative in the change which was followed and aided by “the manly and idiomatic simplicity of Cowper”—before Wordsworth and Coleridge were heard of. He effected his share of the reform quietly; he wrote no doctrinal prefaces, but went and did what he meant. In teaching and practicing a new mode, he did not make the noise of a reformer. He was rather more favorable to the style of Dryden and Pope than to some of the ballad enthusiasts that talked and wrote in extremes. He reformed without any affectation of apostleship in the matter of words and syllables—was no literary red-republican. Thirty or forty years later Wordsworth cried, Heureka! as if something were then first done or found. He announced his theories in long didactic prefaces, laid down doctrines which the genius of Goldsmith and Cowper had already suggested or acted on, and fell into extravagancies which they never dreamed of—exhibiting his muse in a very sans culotte condition; the term (having a masculine reference) is somewhat inapplicable—or should be in a well-regulated state of society—though Mrs. Bloomer is of a contrary opinion. But, Wordsworth, in his love of unadorned Nature, used, in fact, to pull off her garments, along with her ornaments, as if he thought, with those other honest fanatics, the early Quakers, that a state of nudity was a state of grace! Coleridge and Southey were his disciples, but not such mighty prosers; and Coleridge was a far superior spirit to the two others, in all subtle thought and lofty expression, though some of Wordsworth’s lines are truly fine. As for Southey, we are disposed to justify Lord Byron in his contempt of the man and his poetry. He was of an overweening and splenetic nature; there was nothing in his character to neutralize the impression made by the “Vision of Judgment” and “Don Juan” respecting him. With regard to Oliver Goldsmith, Southey is convicted of a willful injustice to the memory of a more genuine poet and better man than himself. In his Life of Cowper, speaking of the poets that came after Pope, he never once alludes to the author of The Deserted Village! He says “the school of Pope was gradually losing its influence,” in proof of which, “almost every poem of any considerable length which obtained any celebrity, during the half century between Pope and Cowper, was writ in blank verse. With the single exception of Falconer’s Shipwreck, it would be in vain to look for any rhymed poem of that age, and of equal extent, which is held in equal estimation with the works of Young, Thompson, Glover, Somerville, Dyer, Akenside and Armstrong.” We all know that one cause, at least, of this studied omission of Goldsmith’s name, was Byron’s favorable opinion of his poetry. This deliberate wrong to the memory of a great departed poet, because of a vehement hatred of a living one, shows Southey’s disposition to be as ungenerous, we may say as contemptible, as his hexameters are coldly manufactured, and surely fated to be dry upon the popular palate to the end of time. He affects to rank Oliver among the followers of Pope and the imitators of his style. But there is as little resemblance between Pope’s terse and splendid rhetoric, and the graphic simplicity and nature of Goldsmith’s poetry, as between the blank verse of Wordsworth or Southey and the noble rhythmus of Paradise Lost. Goldsmith scorned as much to fashion his verse after the mode of Pope as he did to detract from the great merit of that author. He cultivated the elegance and rhyming periods of the classic school, and so identified these with his own original spirit, that he recommended anew what, in themselves, are genuine graces of English poetry. They truly belong to the genius of it—as his fine taste must have taught him—and must continue to do so, in spite of all the sprawling Thalaba hexameters of Southey. The heroic rhyming couplet is capable of as much force, flexibility, and beauty, as any other form of English verse, and is never monotonous in original hands—whether of Chaucer, Dryden, Crabbe, or Keats. Southey, in thus pretending to shut his eyes to the claims of the author of The Traveler, must have still felt (for he was not without a critical sense of the genuine in the Anglo-Saxon) that the great mass of his own poetry, so like a hortus siccus, with its elaborated fancies and exotic imagery, must mainly lie upon the shelves of libraries, while Goldsmith’s is fated to be found upon all book-stalls, and to go about to the households and hearts of the people—to be printed in innumerable editions, ornamented with costly engravings, and be found in all parts of the world where the English language is spoken—read by yet unborn generations on the banks of the Burrampooter, the Mississippi, or the Swan River, as freshly and as feelingly as it was, at first, and still continues to be, on those of the Thames and the Tweed and the Shannon. And so it is; and thus, as the clown in Twelfth Night says, “does the whirligig of time bring in his revenges.” Somebody, we forget who, says the praise of the people is a finer thing than the homage of the critics: and, in this way, the ghost of Oliver must be satisfied to see how posterity vindicates him against the early and the latter detractors. He was a true English poet with an Irish heart; and Sir Joshua Reynolds evinced the genuine prescience of genius (though the world said it was only friendship or flattery) when he gave the ugly face of Oliver that classic tournure which should best suit his destined rank in the peerage of Parnassus.
Goldsmith had left his mark upon the literature of his age, and plainly indicated the character of that which was to come, when he quitted his painful desk forever, in 1774, being then about forty-five years old. At that age Cowper was still unmentioned in the world of letters, but was preparing to carry out the salutary innovations which the other had begun. Goldsmith died £2000 in debt. The booksellers had advanced him money for works to be written. Everybody trusted him. “Was ever poet so trusted before?” says Dr. Johnson. Burke wept when he heard Oliver was dead. Such tears were as eloquent as Johnson’s epitaph. The eyes of the latter were moistened, too; and in a sonorous Greek tetrastich, he called on those who cared for Nature, for the charms of song, or the deeds of ancient days, to weep for the historian, the naturalist, and the poet. Poor Goldie died when he had a chance of liberating himself, in another way, from the task-work of publishers. “Every year he lived,” says Dr. Johnson, “he would have deserved Westminster Abbey more and more.” But Goldsmith’s true Westminster Abbey is the volitare per ora and the keeping of his honest memory by the oi polloi, at their firesides, along with the lares—when, as Macaulay would say, a traveler from the empire of Van Diemans Land may probably be sketching the ruins of that British Santa Croce from a broken arch of London Bridge:—
Nothing to them the sculptor’s art,
The funeral columns, wreaths or urns;
as Halleck so well says respecting Robert Burns, in one of the finest of his lyrics.