OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19505, 29 December 1928, Page 11

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

1728-1771.

(By Augustine Birrcll in the "Nation.") 'Although once upon a time there was a fierce dispute as to the name of the Irish village whero the author of "The Vicar of Wakefield" was born, it is pot now in doubt (despite the wrong date in tho Abbey) that tho event itte|f "went through the formality of takmg place" on November 10th, 1728. Consequently if any of us take pleasure in centenaries, bi or tri, or even more distant dates, and such an occasion, "an excuse for the glass," or for the exhibition of the rare virtue of gratitude, we may this week [written November 10th] join in the celebration of tho bi-centenary of Oliver Goldsmith's birth. Had it hut been the centenary of his birth we should have held aloof from it. No author, so it seems to us, has any right to a centenary until he has been dead a hundred years, for authors may depend upon it, there is nothing like the course of a hundred years after death to disintegrate a literary reputation. If a dead author manages, even by the merest squeak as some havo done, to survive the centenary of his death, we will cheerfully toast his memory and, turning the hour-glass, wish him good luck for another centenary. In the present case it is not the centenary, but the bi-centcnary of Goldsmith's birth—the centenary of his death was passed in 187-1 without much remark. Literary memories require perpetual jogging, authors demand classifying, and of all classifications the chronological one is the easiest. Bibliography is a most useful handmaid to the study of literature. To carry in his head the dates of the First Editions of, say, Bacon's "Novum Organum," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Defoe's "Robinion Crusoe," Butler's "Analogy," Richardson's "Clarissa," Hume's "Essays," Johnson's "Dictionary, 1 ' Fielding's "Tom Jones" and "Joseph Andrews," and Goldsmith's "Vicar of "Wakefield," greatly helps the wayfaring man as ho pursues his dim path through the Forest of Books, and will savo him from some of the most grievous perils of criticism. No eighteenth century British or Irish author occupies a safer position than Dr. Goldsmith, though whore he got his degreo and in what faculty is pleasingly uncertain. Goldsmith can never be crushed out, or completely covered with tho fast falling leaves of forgetfulness. Quite apart from his most popular took, his two plays, his essays, his moving poetry, his incomparable (if mostly uplifted from the French) light verse, he is embalmed and kept sweet in countless and well-remembered "ana" and anecdotes. Everything about him conspires to keep him alive and pleasant. His sepulchre in the Temple Church, long a place of pilgrimage from foreign lands, his famous and oft-quoted epitaph in the Abbey, his vanity, his tailor's bills, his close relationship with Johnson, Boswell'a jealousy, tho love he seldom failed to excite, and the playful ridicule he constantly provoked—all these things crowd and cluster round his memory; and if it ever can be said, without hyperbole, of any man who has been dead more than a century and a half, that ho has achieved immortality, meaning by that no more than that he is not likely to be completely forgotten for a very long time, Goldsmith is he. But the risk 9 authors run even of this meagre allowance of fame are very great, and the chances are against all but a very few. Goldsmith was by birth and early breeding an Irishman of the very kind Englishmen have taken it into their heads to he typical of the whole race of the sons of Erin. He was a Trinity College, Dublin, man, though, like Dr. Johnson at Oxford, he left without taking a degree, and soon bade his native land a long good-night. Yet to be born an Irishman and to attain any measure of celebrity is to have a party always behind you—jealous of your reputation abroad, and never unwilling to take up the cudgels on its behalf. One reason why Boswell's "Johnson" is not so popular a book in Ireland as it might well have been is that the biographer's jealousy of Goldsmith and his constant belittling ef Ursa minor in comparison with Ursa major is throughout plainly noticeable. But even if it had been more cleverly concealed Irishmen would have found it out. Irish noses are never at fault. If an Englishman praises an Irishman the accents of superiority are almost certain to be detected and resented, whilst however delicately faults may be hinted, it is at once set down to congenital hatred and inbred conceit. This undeniable "thin-skinnedness" oMrishmen forces on us the question, Is there anything in it—so far as Goldsmith is concerned P When we »rite about him, is any hateful tone ,it condescension observable in our ittitieisms? All will admit, almost too goabingry, that he wielded a delightful Jp»,- and had a very pretty trick of ♦xquisite humour, out was he not, fhen he comes to be compared with «o»e of the other members of "the CtaV'—say, with Johnson himself—a loinewljat insignificant figure P Bow does the account stand? and that is the first entry? ' What was the verdict pronounced by Johnson upon his friend? A verdict, bo it remembered, not uttered in the |t*y heat of conversation, but deliberIW pronounced in a letter written to ■ si»taet Langton, a man whom John'■'■M respected beyond all other of his vflWßds, This is what Johnson wrote jj'ifte* Goldsmith's death, "Chambers /Jon find is gone far (i.e., to India as 'i* Judge), and poor Goldsmith is gone Jipucn farther. He died of a fever |*XWperated, as I believe, by the fear .'■f distress. He had raised money and it by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense. But «t not his frailties be remembered. He was a very great man." Consider this judgment for a foment, for it comes from the pen of "» greatest "belittler" of men who ■to lived, even in London. Johnson «m& it almost impossible to believe w*t anyone, least of all one of his was ever either happy °J great. Great scoundrels indeed •w>unded, but even they have only beJjOe great by reason of the infamy of 'wjr opinions, like Voltaire, Rousseau, »&a Hume. Nor was this constant deviation due to jealousy—may he Who « disposed to think so be thrice ••surged! It was temperamental, and fln ß to an exaggerated hatred of exJJjSSaration. Burke was, perhaps, the JJffOUe of Johnson's friends whose in{**Wl>al greatness he 9eems always to ?*« acknowledged. Can anyone else J* named whom Johnson would have .Pronounced "a very great man"? y.ttJk.'what grounds did Johnson base frg* judgment? It can hardly have Goldsmith was the author ? t ?ne Vicar of Wakefield," a trifle j* "ODself had rescued and carried off S,™* printer. As usual Hazlitt has ?" a *U the good things that well can 7 o{ tnis famous book, and as he ■ jTjjJMiaged, as he alone could, to 2?®S«. them into one short para"W, it ought to be qudted:

U*S,,!J>«T«IUt, his 'Vicar of Wakefield' *«wft* 1 ? 4 »" Europe. What reader is Ml? tt ; Civilised world who is not the **S™«J*! ,,O, T of the washes which the »Wr*,:?\"imrose demolished so deliber*M*ri»"i "? Poker—for the knowledge of * < i£j™'» *Wcli the Miss Primroses kept 'MTrtrtSL . tt ' ,r Pockets, the adventure of ,hs Vicar's family which conld 0 •*• house, and that of the WSSJ*? *•»% with oranges in their "*t£i J^ r fte ItOT 7 of the MSB of i™ W««»el»« Kn d th« cosmogony.^

All this is fine and pretty, and perhaps not more than just a very little overdrawn, but Dr. Johnson was far too good a Richardsonian (and Clarissa had soaked the world in tears, real tears, twenty-four years before the appearance of the Vicar) to be otherwise than contemptuous of the conventional and heartless morality that would have us believe that a storv could be happily ended by the sudden discovery that owing to the treachery of a coconspirator, a marriage intended by the bridegroom to bo a sham was a canonical marriage, with tho result that the most charming and innocent of girls became tho wedded wife of tho vilest of villains. How our beloved High Church Vicar of Wakefield could for a moment have supposed that his Olivia was sacramentally married to her "squire" passes our understanding. Nor is it likely that Johnson, with his knowledge of the true Comedy of Manners, can have thought that "She Stoops to Conquer" or tho "Goodnatured -Men" had anything really "great" about them. Of Goldsmith's poetry, Johnson certainly thought highly, and had contributed to it, and so may all of us think. A more natural "Tope," though not so great a poet—besides, Johnson would never have consented to call Pope "a very great man." It seems therefore that if Johnson's deliberate judgment is to be supported, it must depend upon the fact well known to Johnson, who after his fashion had read whatever was written in his time in London, that Goldsmith in his essays and miscellaneous writings (other than his Histories, Civil and Natural) had frequently exhibited an originality of reflection and a downright power of thought beyond the tether of Johnson himself. Goldsmith at his best was a thinker without prejudices, national or local. Johnson was a mountain-range of prejudices. As a political thinker Goldsmith was a good European, not to say a cosmopolitan. His sound sense, no less than his kind heart, found him well-disposed towards foreign countries, whilst his keen satiric fancy enabled him to pierce the follies of all countries, including his own. Johnson was enamoured of the Parish Pump; and though, no doubt, it was his glorious fun that made him pretend as a native of Lichfield to despise "the boobies of Birmingham," and as a mere visitor to Plymouth to avow that he would sooner see the whole population of Devonport die of thirst than be allowed to participate in tho water supply of Plymouth, yet these amusing _ extravagances jump with his almost insane ravings against our rebellious colonists, and his frenzied toastings "to the next revolution of tho blacks" in the American States. Goldsmith was quite incapable of these Johnsonian excesses, and up and down his "Chineso Letters" and in other places are to be found not only wisdom, but "forward reaching" thoughts of a calibre for which you mnv look in vain in the "Ramblers ' aiicl "Idlers" (good reading us they are) of his great friend. _ Johnson must have recogntsed tins rare quality of mind when he declared, at a time when the ordinary reader took Goldsmith to be at the very best an inspired idiot, that he was in truth a very great man. Though Goldsmith has been more than usually lucky in his biographers, Washington Irving, Prior, Forster, Dobson, and others, a book by a French writer is by far the most searching and complete examination of the mind and methods of GoldsnntU that has ns yet been published. Ihe writer ranks Goldsmith high enough.in the hierarchy of authors to satisfy tlie most contentious and jealous or Irisnmen, whilst the result of his prolonged examination goes far to maintain the accuracy of Johnson's consideied verneed any lover of literature take tho least exception to the Jrencn critic's other verdict-namely, that Oliver was one of the lightest-fingered of all the light-fingered foreign gentry who have ever gone a-blackberrying m the fields of the French Parnassus. Never since Dr. Ferrier revealed to an illiterate world how the immortal author of "Tristram Shandy had filled his larder out of tho then neglected P a § es of s f +T^pu" tomy," has the pleasant task of tracking a quick-witted author to his "sources" been performed so ettectively and so good-humouredly as in this charming monograph. Goldsmith had early become acquainted with the _ French languag (some say from Irish priests m his boyhood), and finding m French literature the very things he most needed to stimulate his native intellect and to supply his daily necessities, like our first parents, "he scrupled not to eat. The extent of his depredations is no business of ours, but they can easily be ascertained by reading this boo.t, "column by column," and when you lay it down you will be overheard crying aloud: "Nullum quod tetigit, non ornavlt," a morsel of questionable latinity that may be freely rendered thus: "lie stole nothing he did not improve," *"Los Sources Francaises de Goldsmith."