English Literature
reality to wander like a cheerful beggar over Europe, singing and playing
his flute for food and lodging. He may have studied a little at Leyden and
at Padua, but that was only incidental. After a year or more of vagabondage
he returned to London with an alleged medical degree, said to have been
obtained at Louvain or Padua.
The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor,
apothecary's assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as
a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived
from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of
his essays and his _Citizen of the World_ (1760-1761) brought him to the
attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty
and then by his genius, and presently declared him to be "one of the first
men we now have as an author." Johnson's friendship proved invaluable, and
presently Goldsmith found himself a member of the exclusive Literary Club.
He promptly justified Johnson's confidence by publishing _The Traveller_
(1764), which was hailed as one of the finest poems of the century. Money
now came to him liberally, with orders from the booksellers; he took new
quarters in Fleet Street and furnished them gorgeously; but he had an
inordinate vanity for bright-colored clothes, and faster than he earned
money he spent it on velvet cloaks and in indiscriminate charity. For a
time he resumed his practice as a physician, but his fine clothes did not
bring patients, as he expected; and presently he turned to writing again,
to pay his debts to the booksellers. He produced several superficial and
grossly inaccurate schoolbooks,--like his _Animated Nature_ and his
histories of England, Greece, and Rome,--which brought him bread and more
fine clothes, and his _Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village_, and _She
Stoops to Conquer_, which brought him undying fame.
After meeting with Johnson, Goldsmith became the object of Boswell's magpie
curiosity; and to Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ we are indebted for many of
the details of Goldsmith's life,--his homeliness, his awkward ways, his
drolleries and absurdities, which made him alternately the butt and the wit
of the famous Literary Club. Boswell disliked Goldsmith, and so draws an
unflattering Portrait, but even this does not disguise the contagious good
humor which made men love him. When in his forty-seventh year, he fell sick
of a fever, and with childish confidence turned to a quack medicine to cure
himself. He died in 1774, and Johnson placed a tablet, with a sonorous
Latin epitaph, in Westminster Abbey, though Goldsmith was buried elsewhere.
"Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man," said
Johnson; and the literary world--which, like that old dictator, is kind
enough at heart, though often rough in its methods--is glad to accept and
record the verdict.
WORKS OF GOLDSMITH. Of Goldsmith's early essays and his later school
histories little need be said. They have settled into their own place, far
out of sight of the ordinary reader. Perhaps the most interesting of these
is a series of letters for the _Public Ledger_ (afterwards published as
_The Citizen of the World_), written from the view point of an alleged
Chinese traveler, and giving the latter's comments on English
civilization.[204] The following five works are those upon which
Goldsmith's fame chiefly rests:
_The Traveller_ (1764) made Goldsmith's reputation among his
contemporaries, but is now seldom read, except by students who would
understand how Goldsmith was, at one time, dominated by Johnson and his
pseudo-classic ideals. It is a long poem, in rimed couplets, giving a
survey and criticism of the social life of various countries in Europe, and
reflects many of Goldsmith's own wanderings and impressions.
_The Deserted Village_ (1770), though written in the same mechanical style,
is so permeated with honest human sympathy, and voices so perfectly the
revolt of the individual man against institutions, that a multitude of
common people heard it gladly, without consulting the critics as to whether
they should call it good poetry. Notwithstanding its faults, to which
Matthew Arnold has called sufficient attention, it has become one of our
best known poems, though we cannot help wishing that the monotony of its
couplets had been broken by some of the Irish folk songs and ballads that
charmed street audiences in Dublin, and that brought Goldsmith a welcome
from the French peasants wherever he stopped to sing. In the village parson
and the schoolmaster, Goldsmith has increased Chaucer's list by two lovable
characters that will endure as long as the English language. The criticism
that the picture of prosperous "Sweet Auburn" never applied to any village
in Ireland is just, no doubt, but it is outside the question. Goldsmith was
a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his
gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way.
_The Good-Natured Man_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_ are Goldsmith's two
comedies. The former, a comedy of character, though it has some laughable
scenes and one laughable character, Croaker, met with failure on the stage,
and has never been revived with any success. The latter, a comedy of
intrigue, is one of the few plays that has never lost its popularity. Its
lively, bustling scenes, and its pleasantly absurd characters, Marlowe, the
Hardcastles, and Tony Lumpkin, still hold the attention of modern theater
goers; and nearly every amateur dramatic club sooner or later places _She
Stoops to Conquer_ on its list of attractions.
_The Vicar of Wakefield_ is Goldsmith's only novel, and the first in any
language that gives to home life an enduring romantic interest. However
much we admire the beginnings of the English novel, to which we shall
presently refer, we are nevertheless shocked by its frequent brutalities
and indecencies. Goldsmith like Steele, had the Irish reverence for pure
womanhood, and this reverence made him shun as a pest the vulgarity and
coarseness in which contemporary novelists, like Smollett and Sterne,
seemed to delight. So he did for the novel what Addison and Steele had done
for the satire and the essay; he refined and elevated it, making it worthy
of the old Anglo-Saxon ideals which are our best literary heritage.
Briefly, _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is the story of a simple English
clergyman, Dr. Primrose, and his family, who pass from happiness through
great tribulation. Misfortunes, which are said never to come singly, appear
in this case in flocks; but through poverty, sorrow, imprisonment, and the
unspeakable loss of his daughters, the Vicar's faith in God and man emerges
triumphant. To the very end he is like one of the old martyrs, who sings
_Alleluia_ while the lions roar about him and his children in the arena.
Goldsmith's optimism, it must be confessed, is here stretched to the
breaking point. The reader is sometimes offered fine Johnsonian phrases
where he would naturally expect homely and vigorous language; and he is
continually haunted by the suspicion that, even in this best of all
possible worlds, the Vicar's clouds of affliction were somewhat too easily
converted into showers of blessing; yet he is forced to read on, and at the
end he confesses gladly that Goldsmith has succeeded in making a most
interesting story out of material that, in other hands, would have
developed either a burlesque or a brutal tragedy. Laying aside all romantic
passion, intrigue, and adventure, upon which other novelists depended,
Goldsmith, in this simple story of common life, has accomplished three
noteworthy results: he has made human fatherhood almost a divine thing; he
has glorified the moral sentiments which cluster about the family life as
the center of civilization; and he has given us, in Dr. Primrose, a
striking and enduring figure, which seems more like a personal acquaintance
than a character in a book.
WILLIAM COWPER (1731--1800)
In Cowper we have another interesting poet, who, like Gray and Goldsmith,
shows the struggle between romantic and classic ideals. In his first volume
of poems, Cowper is more hampered by literary fashions than was Goldsmith
in his _Traveller_ and his _Deserted Village_. In his second period,
however, Cowper uses blank verse freely; and his delight in nature and in
homely characters, like the teamster and the mail carrier of _The Task_,
shows that his classicism is being rapidly thawed out by romantic feeling.
In his later work, especially his immortal "John Gilpin," Cowper flings
fashions aside, gives Pegasus the reins, takes to the open road, and so
proves himself a worthy predecessor of Burns, who is the most spontaneous
and the most interesting of all the early romanticists.
LIFE. Cowper's life is a pathetic story of a shy and timid genius, who
found the world of men too rough, and who withdrew to nature like a wounded
animal. He was born at Great Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, in 1731, the son
of an English clergyman. He was a delicate, sensitive child, whose early
life was saddened by the death of his mother and by his neglect at home. At
six years he was sent away to a boys' school, where he was terrified by
young barbarians who made his life miserable. There was one atrocious bully
into whose face Cowper could never look; he recognized his enemy by his
shoe buckles, and shivered at his approach. The fierce invectives of his
"Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools" (1784), shows how these school
experiences had affected his mind and health. For twelve years he studied
law, but at the approach of a public examination for an office he was so
terrified that he attempted suicide. The experience unsettled his reason,
and the next twelve months were spent in an asylum at St. Alban's. The
death of his father, in 1756, had brought the poet a small patrimony, which
placed him above the necessity of struggling, like Goldsmith, for his daily
bread. Upon his recovery he boarded for years at the house of the Unwins,
cultured people who recognized the genius hidden in this shy and melancholy
yet quaintly humorous man. Mrs. Unwin, in particular, cared for him as a
son; and whatever happiness he experienced in his poor life was the result
of the devotion of this good woman, who is the "Mary" of all his poems.
A second attack of insanity was brought on by Cowper's morbid interest in
religion, influenced, perhaps, by the untempered zeal of one John Newton, a
curate, with whom Cowper worked in the small parish of Olney, and with whom
he compiled the famous Olney Hymns. The rest of his life, between intervals
of melancholia or insanity, was spent in gardening, in the care of his
numerous pets, and in writing his poems, his translation of Homer, and his
charming letters. His two best known poems were suggested by a lively and
cultivated widow, Lady Austen, who told him the story of John Gilpin and
called for a ballad on the subject. She also urged him to write a long poem
in blank verse; and when he demanded a subject, she whimsically suggested
the sofa, which was a new article of furniture at that time. Cowper
immediately wrote "The Sofa," and, influenced by the poetic possibilities
that lie in unexpected places, he added to this poem from time to time, and
called his completed work _The Task_. This was published in 1785, and the
author was instantly recognized as one of the chief poets of his age. The
last years of his life were a long battle with insanity, until death
mercifully ended the struggle in 1800. His last poem, "The Castaway," is a
cry of despair, in which, under guise of a man washed overboard in a storm,
he describes himself perishing in the sight of friends who are powerless to
help.