Goldsmith | Page 4

William Black
having said or done this or that, in order to
prove that there were signs of the coming greatness. People began to

remember that he had been suspected of scribbling verses, which he
burned. What schoolboy has not done the like? We know how the
biographers of great painters point out to us that their hero early
showed the bent of his mind by drawing the figures of animals on doors
and walls with a piece of chalk; as to which it may be observed that, if
every schoolboy who scribbled verses and sketched in chalk on a brick
wall, were to grow up a genius, poems and pictures would be plentiful
enough. However, there is the apparently authenticated anecdote of
young Goldsmith's turning the tables on the fiddler at his uncle's
dancing-party. The fiddler, struck by the odd look of the boy who was
capering about the room, called out "Æsop!" whereupon Goldsmith is
said to have instantly replied,
"Our herald hath proclaimed this saying, See Æsop dancing and his
monkey playing!"
But even if this story be true, it is worth nothing as an augury; for
quickness of repartee was precisely the accomplishment which the
adult Goldsmith conspicuously lacked. Put a pen into his hand, and
shut him up in a room: then he was master of the situation--nothing
could be more incisive, polished, and easy than his playful sarcasm.
But in society any fool could get the better of him by a sudden question
followed by a horse-laugh. All through his life--even after he had
become one of the most famous of living writers--Goldsmith suffered
from want of self-confidence. He was too anxious to please. In his
eager acquiescence, he would blunder into any trap that was laid for
him. A grain or two of the stolid self-sufficiency of the blockheads who
laughed at him would not only have improved his character, but would
have considerably added to the happiness of his life.
As a natural consequence of this timidity, Goldsmith, when opportunity
served, assumed airs of magnificent importance. Every one knows the
story of the mistake on which She Stoops to Conquer is founded.
Getting free at last from all the turmoil, and anxieties, and
mortifications of school-life, and returning home on a lent hack, the
released schoolboy is feeling very grand indeed. He is now sixteen,
would fain pass for a man, and has a whole golden guinea in his pocket.

And so he takes the journey very leisurely until, getting benighted in a
certain village, he asks the way to the "best house," and is directed by a
facetious person to the house of the squire. The squire by good luck
falls in with the joke; and then we have a very pretty comedy
indeed--the impecunious schoolboy playing the part of a fine
gentleman on the strength of his solitary guinea, ordering a bottle of
wine after his supper, and inviting his landlord and his landlord's wife
and daughter to join him in the supper-room. The contrast, in She
Stoops to Conquer, between Marlow's embarrassed diffidence on
certain occasions and his audacious effrontery on others, found many a
parallel in the incidents of Goldsmith's own life; and it is not
improbable that the writer of the comedy was thinking of some of his
own experiences, when he made Miss Hardcastle say to her timid suitor:
"A want of courage upon some occasions assumes the appearance of
ignorance, and betrays us when we most want to excel."
It was, perhaps, just as well that the supper, and bottle of wine, and
lodging at Squire Featherston's had not to be paid for out of the
schoolboy's guinea; for young Goldsmith was now on his way to
college, and the funds at the disposal of the Goldsmith family were not
over abundant. Goldsmith's sister having married the son of a well-to
do man, her father considered it a point of honour that she should have
a dowry: and in giving her a sum of £400 he so crippled the means of
the family, that Goldsmith had to be sent to college not as a pensioner
but as a sizar. It appears that the young gentleman's pride revolted
against this proposal; and that he was won over to consent only by the
persuasions of his uncle Contarine, who himself had been a sizar. So
Goldsmith, now in his eighteenth year, went to Dublin; managed
somehow or other--though he was the last in the list--to pass the
necessary examination; and entered upon his college career (1745.)
How he lived, and what he learned, at Trinity College, are both largely
matters of conjecture; the chief features of such record as we have are
the various means of raising a little money to which the poor sizar had
to resort; a continual quarrelling
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