Goldsmith | Page 7

Vicar of Wakefield. It is the more to be regretted that we
have no authentic record of these devious wanderings, that by this time
Goldsmith had acquired, as is shown in other letters, a polished, easy,
and graceful style, with a very considerable faculty of humorous
observation. Those ingenious letters to his uncle (they usually included
a little hint about money) were, in fact, a trifle too literary both in
substance and in form; we could even now, looking at them with a
pardonable curiosity, have spared a little of their formal antithesis for
some more precise information about the writer and his surroundings.

The strangest thing about this strange journey all over Europe was the
failure of Goldsmith to pick up even a common and ordinary
acquaintance with the familiar facts of natural history. The ignorance
on this point of the author of the Animated Nature was a constant
subject of jest among Goldsmith's friends. They declared he could not
tell the difference between any two sorts of barndoor fowl until he saw
them cooked and on the table. But it may be said prematurely here that,
even when he is wrong as to his facts or his sweeping generalisations,
one is inclined to forgive him on account of the quaint gracefulness and
point of his style. When Mr. Burchell says, "This rule seems to extend
even to other animals: the little vermin race are ever treacherous, cruel,
and cowardly, whilst those endowed with strength and power are
generous, brave, and gentle," we scarcely stop to reflect that the merlin,
which is not much bigger than a thrush, has an extraordinary courage
and spirit, while the lion, if all stories be true, is, unless when goaded
by hunger, an abject skulker. Elsewhere, indeed, in the Animated
Nature, Goldsmith gives credit to the smaller birds for a good deal of
valour, and then goes on to say, with a charming freedom,--"But their
contentions are sometimes of a gentler nature. Two male birds shall
strive in song till, after a long struggle, the loudest shall entirely silence
the other. During these contentions the female sits an attentive silent
auditor, and often rewards the loudest songster with her company
during the season." Yet even this description of the battle of the bards,
with the queen of love as arbiter, is scarcely so amusing as his
happy-go-lucky notions with regard to the variability of species. The
philosopher, flute in hand, who went wandering from the canals of
Holland to the ice-ribbed falls of the Rhine, may have heard from time
to time that contest between singing-birds which he so imaginatively
describes; but it was clearly the Fleet-Street author, living among books,
who arrived at the conclusion that intermarriage of species is common
among small birds and rare among big birds. Quoting some lines of
Addison's which express the belief that birds are a virtuous race--that
the nightingale, for example, does not covet the wife of his neighbour,
the blackbird--Goldsmith goes on to observe,--"But whatever may be
the poet's opinion, the probability is against this fidelity among the
smaller tenants of the grove. The great birds are much more true to
their species than these; and, of consequence, the varieties among them

are more few. Of the ostrich, the cassowary, and the eagle, there are but
few species; and no arts that man can use could probably induce them
to mix with each other."
What he did bring back from his foreign travels was a medical degree.
Where he got it, and how he got it, are alike matters of pure conjecture;
but it is extremely improbable that--whatever he might have been
willing to write home from Padua or Louvain, in order to coax another
remittance from his Irish friends--he would afterwards, in the presence
of such men as Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, wear sham honours. It is
much more probable that, on his finding those supplies from Ireland
running ominously short, the philosophic vagabond determined to
prove to his correspondents that he was really at work somewhere,
instead of merely idling away his time, begging or borrowing the
wherewithal to pass him from town to town. That he did see something
of the foreign universities is evident from his own writings; there are
touches of description here and there which he could not well have got
from books. With this degree, and with such book-learning and such
knowledge of nature and human nature as he had chosen or managed to
pick up during all those years, he was now called upon to begin life for
himself. The Irish supplies stopped altogether. His letters were left
unanswered. And so Goldsmith somehow or other got back to London
(February 1, 1756), and had to cast about for some way of earning his
daily bread.
CHAPTER IV.
Early