Goldsmith

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Goldsmith, by William Black

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Title: Goldsmith English Men of Letters Series
Author: William Black
Editor: John Morley
Release Date: July 27, 2006 [EBook #18917]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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English Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY

GOLDSMITH

BY
WILLIAM BLACK

London
MACMILLAN AND CO
1878
* * * * *

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
CHAPTER III.
IDLENESS, AND FOREIGN TRAVEL
CHAPTER IV.
EARLY STRUGGLES.--HACK-WRITING
CHAPTER V.
BEGINNING OF AUTHORSHIP.--THE BEE
CHAPTER VI.
PERSONAL TRAITS
CHAPTER VII.
THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.--BEAU NASH
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ARREST
CHAPTER IX.
THE TRAVELLER
CHAPTER X.
MISCELLANEOUS WRITING
CHAPTER XI.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD
CHAPTER XII.
THE GOOD-NATURED MAN
CHAPTER XIII.
GOLDSMITH IN SOCIETY
CHAPTER XIV.
THE DESERTED VILLAGE
CHAPTER XV.
OCCASIONAL WRITINGS
CHAPTER XVI.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
CHAPTER XVII.
INCREASING DIFFICULTIES.--THE END
* * * * *

GOLDSMITH
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
"Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom." So wrote Oliver Goldsmith; and surely among those who have earned the world's gratitude by this ministration he must be accorded a conspicuous place. If, in these delightful writings of his, he mostly avoids the darker problems of existence--if the mystery of the tragic and apparently unmerited and unrequited suffering in the world is rarely touched upon--we can pardon the omission for the sake of the gentle optimism that would rather look on the kindly side of life. "You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you," says Mr. Thackeray. "Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon save the harp on which he plays to you; and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tents, or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty." And it is to be suspected--it is to be hoped, at least--that the cheerfulness which shines like sunlight through Goldsmith's writings, did not altogether desert himself even in the most trying hours of his wayward and troubled career. He had, with all his sensitiveness, a fine happy-go-lucky disposition; was ready for a frolic when he had a guinea, and, when he had none, could turn a sentence on the humorous side of starvation; and certainly never attributed to the injustice or neglect of society misfortunes the origin of which lay nearer home.
Of course, a very dark picture might be drawn of Goldsmith's life; and the sufferings that he undoubtedly endured have been made a whip with which to lash the ingratitude of a world not too quick to recognise the claims of genius. He has been put before us, without any brighter lights to the picture, as the most unfortunate of poor devils; the heart-broken usher; the hack ground down by sordid booksellers; the starving occupant of successive garrets. This is the aspect of Goldsmith's career which naturally attracts Mr. Forster. Mr. Forster seems to have been haunted throughout his life by the idea that Providence had some especial spite against literary persons; and that, in a measure to compensate them for their sad lot, society should be very kind to them, while the Government of the day might make them Companions of the Bath or give them posts in the Civil Service. In the otherwise copious, thorough, and valuable Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, we find an almost humiliating insistance on the complaint that Oliver Goldsmith did not receive greater recognition and larger sums of money from his contemporaries. Goldsmith is here "the poor neglected sizar"; his "marked ill-fortune" attends him constantly; he shares "the evil destinies of men of letters"; he was one of those who "struggled into fame without the aid of English institutions"; in short, "he wrote, and paid the penalty." Nay, even Christianity itself is impeached on account of the persecution suffered by poor Goldsmith. "There had been a Christian religion extant for seventeen-hundred and fifty-seven years," writes Mr. Forster, "the world having been acquainted, for even so long, with its spiritual necessities and responsibilities; yet here, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was the eminence ordinarily conceded to a spiritual teacher, to one of those men who come upon the earth to lift their fellow-men above its miry ways. He is up in a garret, writing for bread he cannot get, and dunned for a milkscore he cannot pay." That Christianity might have been worse employed than in paying the milkman's score is true enough, for then the milkman would have come by his own; but that Christianity,