4 April: Boreham on Oliver Goldsmith

Tears and Twinkles
It would be a pity to pass the anniversary of the death of Oliver Goldsmith without some fresh attempt to assess his real importance. He stands on a pedestal of his own. Of short but sinewy frame, with low protruding forehead and a round, pale face that is sadly marked with smallpox, he is the most conspicuous figure in that galaxy of half-serious, half-humorous Irishmen—Irishmen who carry a tear in one eye and a twinkle in the other—by whom our literature has been so luxuriously enriched. His welcome into the world was a somewhat doubtful one. His parents were as poor as the proverbial church mice, and their hands were already fairly full. A new baby started a hundred fresh problems. They lived in an Irish village so small, so lonely, and so remote that Macaulay says of it that no settlement in the backwoods of Canada or in the Australian bush could be more difficult of access. Its extreme isolation still further embarrassed the unhappy rector and his wife who were expected to nourish, clothe, and educate their family on a stipend of forty pounds a year.

It is often said that every man is a bundle of contradictions. Goldsmith certainly was. Every vice in his composition was flatly negatived by a corresponding virtue; every virtue was stultified by a disfiguring vice. As a boy he was brushed aside as impenetrably stupid; yet priceless classics slumbered in his brain. In one sense, no man was more fickle; in another, no man was more constant. As a youth he passed from one occupation to another as though he had no mind of his own. He tried his hand at half a dozen professions in as many years; he was everything by turns, and nothing long. A creature of fits and starts, he was the victim of odd whims and grotesque fancies. Yet in his friendships he was the essence of fidelity. He clung to his companions through thick and thin, and would share his last coin or his last crust with a comrade in distress. In one sense he was a gipsy; in another he was a citizen. In one sense he was positively repulsive; in another he was extremely engaging. In one sense he was the village fool; in another he was a paragon of wisdom. Never, in all probability, was one personality endowed with so many conflicting qualities. Say almost anything you will about Goldsmith, and the exact opposite also is true.

Roll Of Waste Paper That Made Literary History
It is part of the pathos of life that the cranks and crochets of a singular man unduly assert and exaggerate themselves, obscuring the nobler and finer qualities which lie beneath. His oddities, his eccentricities, his idiosyncrasies conceal his merit. Among such men, Goldsmith stands out majestically. Small minds were deceived by his ludicrous peculiarities; they recognised in him nothing but a target for their toothless jests. But men of clearer vision and statelier calibre suspected, or discerned, the truth. It is enough to remember that Edmund Burke, when he heard that Goldsmith was dead, burst into tears; whilst Sir Joshua Reynolds dropped his brushes, closed his studio, and paced the streets in inconsolable sorrow. And scores of poor creatures, too, illiterate to have read a line that Goldsmith had written, crowded the stair leading to his lodgings and lamented the passing of one who, out of his own poverty, had never refused to help them.

Goldsmith's fame pounced suddenly upon him. One Winter morning towards the end of 1764—he was then thirty-six and had ten more years to live—he was crouching in his garret in desperate straits. His rent being hopelessly in arrear, his landlady had sent for the bailiff. Hearing of the young Irishman's distressful plight, Dr. Johnson lumbered round to see what could be done. "Have you anything," asked Johnson, "on which we could raise a pound or two?" For a while the miserable debtor cudgelled his brains to no purpose. Then, by a sudden brain wave, his erratic mind turned to a roll of manuscript in the corner cupboard, a scroll of which he had thought as just so much waste paper. He told Johnson of its existence. The old doctor shuffled off to a bookseller of his acquaintance and sold the document for sixty pounds. Thus the world became possessed of "The Vicar of Wakefield."

Goldsmith As Pioneer Of Romanticism In Prose
Goldsmith stands today as one of the great formative influences in our literature. Fielding and Richardson pioneered the English novel, but they did not perfect it. They depicted life—life suffused with pathos—but it was Goldsmith who had the genius to perceive that to sentiment might be added simplicity; it was in him that the idyllic strain first appeared. Goldsmith followed upon the heels of Henry Fielding, and, at the same time, prepared the way for Charles Dickens. And in Dickens and his illustrious contemporaries the school that Goldsmith had founded reached high-water-mark.

Happily for us, Goldsmith has been singularly favoured in his biographers. At the outset, it is true, there was ground for the bitterest disappointment. The world will never forgive the men who knew Goldsmith intimately, for having neglected to write the record that, in the nature of things, they were best fitted to pen. Goldsmith had two friends—Johnson and Percy—either of whom would have added materially to his own laurels by inditing the biography. Percy actually undertook to do so. But they both let the opportunity slip. Their failure, however, attracted the attention of a multitude of later writers, with the result that Prior and Forster, Washington Irving and William Black have each in turn presented the world with a vivid and convincing portrayal of Goldsmith's laughable but lovable personality. He who today turns out of the bustle of Fleet St. to explore the quiet gardens and narrow courts that were once haunted by Johnson and Garrick, Reynolds and Gibbon, will stumble as he passes along the north side of Temple Church upon a mound that bears in large letters the name of Oliver Goldsmith. And he will instinctively bare his head in honour of one of the most original, one of the most open-hearted and one of the most ingratiating personages in our literary annals.

F W Boreham

Image: Oliver Goldsmith