from the tenth to the fifteenth, had been his second morning's work and when Cooke entered his chamber he read them to him aloud “Come,” he added, "let me tell you this is no bad morning's work and now, my dear boy, if you are not better engaged, I should b glad to enjoy a shoemaker's holiday with you. This was a cheap country excursion, terminated by a supper in town, at the Grecian Coffee-house or the Globe in Fleet-street. It was by this patient elaboration, this toilsome devotion of the best hours of his best years, that he produced the two great poems on which his fame rests, and which, wherever the English language is spoken, and as long as it continues to be read, will carry and perpet uate the name of Goldsmith. His blunders and his brogue, his vanity, and his habit of blurting out what was uppermost in his mind, these defects made Goldsmith too often the butt of the circles in which he moved; and yet there seems to have been no one whose company was more liked. He was beloved by Burke and Reynolds. When the great statesman heard of his death he burst into tears. To Sir Joshua his loss is said to have been the severest blow he ever suffered. The stately and formal Bishop Percy, the earliest of his distinguished friends, was warmly attached to him. He says, not only that there never was a man more benevolent and friendly, but that whatever appeared of envy or jealousy in his conduct was a mere momentary sensation, that he knew not how, like other men, to conceal. Though coarse and rough with him as with all the world, Johnson admired Goldsmith, and permitted no one to abuse him with impunity. The simple, frolicsome, blundering, improvident, big-hearted, impulsive Irishman, was very dear to his sometime brother of Grub-street, the great sage and moralist, who appreciated his genius, and insisted always that whatever he undertook he did it better than anybody else. Much that we know of Goldsmith we derive from writers who had no love for him. Neither Boswell, nor Beattie, nor Cumberland, can be entirely relied upon, when he is the subject. They had all private griefs, which distorted their judgment and gave a false color to their portraits. Boswell knew that he had spoken of him contemptuously, as a burr sticking to Johnson, and was jealous of his hold on the affections of their common friend. He rebuked Reynolds for flattering, in an allegorical picture, "so mean a writer as Beattie" at the expense of a genius like Voltaire; and Beattie thought that Goldsmith was envious of him! Cumberland was a coxcomb, and talks of Goldsmith's dining with "us," as if the poet was only a chance visitor, and himself an habitué of the brilliant circle in which they met. Not only, then, has he been represented as a mere fool by those who were really fools (as Northcote says), he was also disparaged by those who were more moved by malice than folly. But, in spite of all the cavils and caricatures of rivals, in spite of faults and foibles too well known and too severely punished in his lifetime, the praise cannot be denied him of being a perfectly pure writer; and one to whom Dr. Johnson consented to award the title could not have been otherwise than a very great man. "Goldsmith's poetry," says Mr. Campbell, who was no less a critic than poet, "enjoys a calm and steady popularity. It inspires us, indeed, with no admiration of daring design or of fertile invention; but it presents, within its narrow limits, a distinct and unbroken view of poetical delightfulness. His descriptions and sentiments have the pure zest of nature. He is refined without false delicacy, and correct without insipidity. Perhaps there is an intellectual composure in his manner, which may, in some passages, be said to approach to the reserved and prosaic; but he unbends from this graver strain of reflection to tenderness, and even to playfulness, with an ease and grace almost exclusively his own; and connects extensive views of the happiness and interests of society with pictures of life that touch the heart by their familiarity. His language is certainly simple, though it is not cast in a rugged or careless mould. He is no disciple of the gaunt and famished school of simplicity. Deliberately as he wrote, he cannot be accused of wanting natural and idiomatic expression. He uses the ornaments which must always distinguish true poetry from prose; and when he adopts colloquial plainness, it is with the utmost care and skill, to avoid a vulgar humility. There is more of this sustained simplicity, of this chaste economy and choice of words, in Goldsmith, than in any modern poet." DEDICATION. TO THE REV. HENRY GOLDSMITH. DEAR SIR: I am sensible that the friendship between us can acquire no new force from the ceremonies of a dedication; and perhaps it demands an excuse thus to prefix your name to my attempts, which you decline giving with your own. But as a part of this poem was formerly written to you from Switzerland, the whole can now, with propriety, be only inscribed to you. It will also throw a light upon many parts of it, when the reader understands that it is addressed to a man who, despising fame and fortune, has retired early to happiness and obscurity with an income of forty pounds a year. I now perceive, my dear brother, the wisdom of your humble choice. You have entered upon a sacred office, where the harvest is great, and the laborers are but few; while you have left the field of ambition, where the laborers are many, and the harvest not worth carrying away. But of all kinds of ambition what from the refinement of the times, from different systems of criticism, and from the divisions of party that which pursues poetical fame is the wildest. Poetry makes a principal amusement among unpolished nations; but in a country verging to the extremes of refinement, Painting and Music come in for a share. As these offer the feeble mind a less laborious entertainment, they at first rival Poetry, and at length supplant her; they engross all that favor once shown to her, and though but younger sisters, seize upon the elder's birthright. Yet, however this art may be neglected by the powerful, it is still in greater danger from the mistaken efforts of the learned to improve it. What criticisms have we not heard of late in favor of blank verse and Pindaric odes, choruses, anapests, and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it: and as he is generally much in the wrong, so he has always much to say; for error is ever talkative. But there is an enemy to this art still more dangerous-I mean party. Party entirely distorts the judgment, and destroys the taste. When the mind is once infected with this disease, it can only find pleasure in what contributes to increase the distemper. Like the tiger, that seldom desists from pursuing man after having once preyed upon human flesh, the reader who has once gratified his appetite with calumny makes ever after the most agreeable feast upon murdered reputation. Such readers generally admire some half-witted thing, who wants to be thought a bold man, having lost the character of a wise one. Him they dignify with the name of poet: his tawdry lampoons are called satires; his turbulence is said to be force, and his frenzy fire. What reception a Poem may find, which has neither abuse, party, nor blank verse, to support it, I cannot tell, nor am I solicitous to know. My aims are right. Without espousing the cause of any party, I have attempted to moderate the rage of all. I have endeavored to show that there may be equal happiness in states that are differently governed from our own; that every state has a particular principle of happiness; and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess. There are few can judge better than yourself how far these positions are illustrated in this poem. I am, Your most affectionate brother, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. |
