Goldsmith | Page 2

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, or the state, or society should be
scolded because an author suffers the natural consequences of his
allowing his expenditure to exceed his income, seems a little hard. And
this is a sort of writing that is peculiarly inappropriate in the case of
Goldsmith, who, if ever any man was author of his own misfortunes,
may fairly have the charge brought against him. "Men of genius," says
Mr. Forster, "can more easily starve, than the world, with safety to
itself, can continue to neglect and starve them." Perhaps so; but the
English nation, which has always had a regard and even love for Oliver
Goldsmith, that is quite peculiar in the history of literature, and which
has been glad to overlook his faults and follies, and eager to sympathise
with him in the many miseries of his career, will be slow to believe that
it is responsible for any starvation that Goldsmith may have endured.
However, the key-note has been firmly struck, and it still vibrates.
Goldsmith was the unluckiest of mortals, the hapless victim of
circumstances. "Yielding to that united pressure of labour, penury, and
sorrow, with a frame exhausted by unremitting and ill-rewarded
drudgery, Goldsmith was indebted to the forbearance of creditors for a
peaceful burial." But what, now, if some foreigner strange to the
traditions of English literature--some Japanese student, for example, or
the New Zealander come before his time--were to go over the
ascertained facts of Goldsmith's life, and were suddenly to announce to
us, with the happy audacity of ignorance, that he, Goldsmith, was a
quite exceptionally fortunate person? "Why," he might say, "I find that
in a country where the vast majority of people are born to labour,
Oliver Goldsmith was never asked to do a stroke of work towards the
earning of his own living until he had arrived at man's estate. All that
was expected of him, as a youth and as a young man, was that he
should equip himself fully for the battle of life. He was maintained at
college until he had taken his degree. Again and again he was furnished
with funds for further study and foreign travel; and again and again he
gambled his opportunities away. The constant kindness of his uncle

only made him the best begging-letter-writer the world has seen. In the
midst of his debt and distress as a bookseller's drudge, he receives £400
for three nights' performance of The Good-Natured Man; he
immediately purchases chambers in Brick Court for £400; and
forthwith begins to borrow as before. It is true that he died owing
£2000, and was indebted to the forbearance of creditors for a peaceful
burial; but it appears that during the last seven years of his life he had
been earning an annual income equivalent to £800 of English
currency.[1] He was a man liberally and affectionately brought up, who
had many relatives and many friends, and who had the proud
satisfaction--which has been denied to many men of genius--of
knowing for years before he died that his merits as a writer had been
recognised by the great bulk of his countrymen. And yet this strange
English nation is inclined to suspect that it treated him rather badly; and
Christianity is attacked because it did not pay Goldsmith's milkscore."
[Footnote 1: The calculation is Lord Macaulay's: see his Biographical
Essays.]
Our Japanese friend may be exaggerating; but his position is after all
fairly tenable. It may at least be looked at, before entering on the
following brief résumé of the leading facts in Goldsmith's life, if only
to restore our equanimity. For, naturally, it is not pleasant to think that
any previous generation, however neglectful of the claims of literary
persons (as compared with the claims of such wretched creatures as
physicians, men of science, artists, engineers, and so forth) should so
cruelly have ill-treated one whom we all love now. This inheritance of
ingratitude is more than we can bear. Is it true that Goldsmith was so
harshly dealt with by those barbarian ancestors of ours?
CHAPTER II.
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE.
The Goldsmiths were of English descent; Goldsmith's father was a
Protestant clergyman in a poor little village in the county of Longford;
and when Oliver, one of several children, was born in this village of

Pallas, or Pallasmore, on the 10th November, 1728, the Rev. Charles
Goldsmith was passing rich on £40 a year. But a couple of years later