Oliver Goldsmith

Southland Times, Issue 22210, 30 December 1933, Page 15

Oliver Goldsmith

Recently, I read a very interesting autobiography of Oliver Goldsmith. He began life with a very heavy handicap, for he was an ungainly, thick, pale-faced, pock-marked boy, whose school-mates made fun of him as a stupid, heavy blockhead. Spite of the laughter roused by his appearance and dullness, he was kind and affectionate, but so subject to extraordinary alternations from gaiety to gloom that he seemed to have a double personality. Flashes of precocious wit would startle his friends and cover his critics with confusion. At a party little Noll jumped up, and excuted a dance by himself round the room. The lad looked so grotesque that the fiddler exclaimed, “Aesop!” The author of the fables was popularly believed to have been an unusually ugly fellow. The comparison set the whole company laughing when suddenly Noll, stopping his hornpipe, said, without hesitation:—“Heralds! proclaim aloud! all say, see Aesop dancing and his monkey playing.” Unfortunately the world would not let Goldsmith forget his supposed defects, and his consciousness of them deepened as the years rolled on. His forbears had tire reputation of being worthy people, with their hearts in the right place, but their heads badly adjusted. Born at Pallas, in Longford, Ireland, on 10th November, 1728, he drew upon his early recollections when in later times he immortalized his father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, as “passing rich on £4O a year.” At the age of seventeen, when school days were ended, he gave indications of that tendency to swagger which clung to him through life. He strutted about in clothes which his biographer, Forster, says were noted rather for fineness than fitness. The picture of him in the service of the Duke of Hamilton at Holyrood Palace represents him as clothed in a uniform of pale blue. Entering Trinity College, Dublin, in 1745, he developed a faculty for song and blew off his excitement through his flute. Another and more discreditable habit was that of avoiding lectures whenever he could, and consequently getting into all kinds of scrapes. His father’s death in 1747 threw him on his own recources, and he wrote street ballads, which he sold for five shillings each, and “avould steal out of the college at night to hear them sung.” Would it ever come into his head that one day the whole world would listen to him with rapt attention? The five shillings he got for a ballad did not always accompany him to his home. Some begger on the road would appeal to his pity, and get all his hard-earned money. He was even known to have stripped off some of his clothes and given them to a shivering wretch. To a poor woman with five crying children he gave the blankets off his bed, and tried to keep tire cold from himself by creeping into the ticking. Unfortunately he had an unsympathetic and cruel tutor, and being involved in a riot and falling into other disgraces Goldsmith ran away from college, and set out for Cork with a shilling in his pocket. With the help of his brother he returned to college, took his degree, and at the suggestion of his uncle resolved to study for the church, but was rejected by the Bishop of Elphin. One reason assigned by a certain authority is that Goldsmith appeared before the bishop arrayed in scarlet breeches. The sum of £5O was given him by his uncle to take up the study of law, but he gambled it away in Dublin. After three years of idleness he set out for Edinburgh in 1752 to enrol as a medical student. With his usual forgetfulness and lack of business habits he left luggage at hired lodgings, and promptly forgot the name of the street and the landlady. Fortunately he met the porter who had carried his trunk, and everything was right. How far he prosecuted his studies is not exactly known, but he gained an amazing repute as a teller of humorous stories and a singer of Irish songs. Arrested again and again for debt he ran off at last to Leyden, lost more of his uncle’s money at the gaming table, wandered on foot through Flanders, France, Germany and Italy, got some kind of a degree in medicine at Padua, and arrived back in England with a few coppers in his pocket. After practising his profession for a little while in Southwark he became a proof reader, then a teacher in an academy, but the year 1758 set him in the direction of his life work. He wrote a translation of a French work, and followed this up by an “Inquiry into the present state of polite learning in Europe,” the periodical called “The Bee” and contributions to various journals. In 1760 he published “The Citizen of the World” and in 1766 “The Vicar of Wakefield.” Having established his genius as a novelist he turned his attention to the stage, producing first The Good Natur’d Man and afterwards that most popular comedy She Stoops to Conquer. Between these two efforts he published The Deserted Village in 1770. It was on the 15th March, 1773, that “Goldy’s play” was produced at Covent Garden, and the author had his temper sorely tried by actors and actresses throwing up their parts. Some of his friends advised him to postpone the production, but he answered: “I’d rather my play were damned by bad players than merely saved by good acting.” When the great day came, Johnson presided at the dinner of Goldsmith’s friends. During the feast the author hardly spoke a word or swallowed a mouthful, and when the party moved to the theatre he went in the opposite direction. A friend found him sauntering between seven and eight o’clock in the Mail of St Jame’s Park. The play was an immense success, and Johnson praised it highly as answering so much the great end of comedy, making an audience merry.

Six years of fame, which meant also six years of unremitting toil, constant anxious and much won-ying controversy, had told upon his health. He had finished the Animated Nature, and was engaged on other work, all the while cherishing the hope of a restful future, but an old illness due to sedentary habits drove him back to London in March, 1774. With remarkable obstinacy he made up his mind to stick to a particular medicine. The doctor, puzzled by the pulse, asked if his mind was at ease. “No it is not,” was Goldsmith’s answer. These, were the last words he spoke. He died on the 4th April, 1774. The reference to the uneasy mind was nd doubt due to the fact that he was over £2OOO in debt. No wonder Johnson wrote to Boswell: “Was ever poet so trusted before?” He was buried in the resting place attached to the Temple Church, and a monument was erected to him in the poets’ corner in Westminster Abbey. The inscription was written in Latin by Johnson, and includes the beautiful line said to have been suggested by Fenelon; “He touched nothing which he did not adorn.”

Goldsmith’s was a chequered life, dogged by physical disadvantages, bitter poverty and a pecular temperament, and by not finding its true mission till within a few years of his death. One sees him meandering through Europe, a kind of troubadour, and yet received by men of learning in different cities. He heard Voltaire and Diderot talk till three o’clock in the morning.

One of his foibles was his fondness for finery. His expenditure. on Philistine luxuries kept him toiling like a slave to pay his bills. His Wilton carpets and coats “of Tyrain bloom” were beyond his means, and his entertainments pained his guests, because of the cost. Difficulties darkened his last days. But who could help loving this warm-hearted, generous and gentle soul? His writings are rich in tender-

ness and humour, in keen appresiation of true goodness, and in a certain mysterious charm allied to a remarkable purity of style.