THE GOOD-NATURED MAN. A COMEDY.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER; OR, THE MISTAKES OF A NIGHT A COMEDY.
A SKETCH
OF THE
LIFE OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
The middle of the last century was an evil time, in England, for literature and for literary men. The period was eminently one of transition; and transition periods are always times of trial to all whose interests they affect. The old system passes away, bearing with it those who cling to it; the new system requires time until it is in working order, and those who depend upon its advent for their subsistence are sorely harassed while the turmoil lasts. Thus it was with literature at the time when Goldsmith began to write. The age in which literary men depended upon patrons had passed away. No more snug government berths, no more secretaryships, as in the time of Addison and Prior and Steele—and the time when the public was to support literature had not yet come.
Thus the author was compelled either to depend entirely on the booksellers, or to sell his pen, in true hireling fashion, to the government of the day, or to the opposition, and to scribble approval or invective at his master's dictation. Happily for his own fame, happily for English literature, the author of the "Vicar of Wakefield" chose the former alternative.
Oliver Goldsmith was born at Pallas, or Pallasmore, county Longford, Ireland, on the 10th of November, 1728. He was one of a numerous family, of whom he alone attained celebrity. His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, a clergyman of the Established Church, was in very poor circumstances at the time of the birth of his famous son; but little Oliver was only two years old when the sunshine of prosperity descended upon his house, with what must have appeared to the inmates quite a blaze of noonday splendour. The small income of forty pounds a-year, upon which the Rev. Charles Goldsmith had managed painfully and penuriously to struggle on with his family, was suddenly increased to two hundred, when the rectory of Kilkenny-west was obtained by that fortunate divine; and the Goldsmiths removed to Lissoy, near Athlone.
The Rev. Charles Goldsmith seems to have possessed, in a very large degree, certain traits of character by which all the Goldsmiths were more or less distinguished. Almost culpably careless in worldly matters, his easy good-nature and kindly generous disposition frequently made him the dupe of the designing and ungrateful. Himself incapable of cunning and deceit, he imagined that all men were frank and open. The last man in the world to take an unfair advantage of his neighbour, he never suspected that any man could possibly take advantage of him. Goldsmith himself under the guise of the Man in Black, gives us an insight into affairs at the Rectory in these early days. "My father's education," the Man in Black tells us, "was above his fortune, and his generosity greater than his education." Then we hear of numerous guests entertained at the hospitable parson's table, and paying for their dinner by laughing at the host's oft-repeated jests and time-honoured anecdotes. "He told the story of the ivy tree, and that was laughed at; he repeated the jest of the two scholars and one pair of breeches, and the company laughed at that; but the story of Taffy in the sedan chair was sure to set the table in a roar; thus his pleasure increased in proportion to the pleasure he gave; he loved all the world; and he fancied all the world loved him. We were told that universal benevolence was what first cemented society; we were taught to consider all the wants of mankind as our own; to regard the human face divine with affection and esteem; he wound us up to be mere machines of pity, and rendered us incapable of withstanding the slightest impulse made either by real or fictitious distress; in a word, we were perfectly instructed in the art of giving away thousands before we were taught the more necessary qualifications of getting a farthing."
The Man in Black—(Citizen of the World.)
In fact, this inimitable Man in Black, who appears as one of the characters in Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World," is, in many respects, a counterpart of Goldsmith himself. Like our author, he is overreached by every knave, and an object of contemptuous pity to all the worldly wise. He tries one position after another, and fails in each, chiefly through his honesty and credulity. He cannot succeed as follower to a great man, because he will not flatter where he disapproves; he loses his mistress because he believes her sincere when she expresses admiration of him, and detestation of his rival's high-heeled shoes. Everywhere he is snubbed and elbowed away by men more versed than himself in the ways of the world; but, like Goldsmith again, he has an easy, good-humoured philosophy, that carries him gaily through trials and troubles that would have swamped other men. As he cannot be rich and happy, he resolves to be poor and contented. He does not "invoke gods and men to see him dining upon a ha'porth of radishes;" but rather tries to persuade himself and others that a vegetable diet suits him. And he has his reward in the verdict universally pronounced upon him—that he "is very good-natured, and has not the least harm in him."
On a lad of ordinary disposition, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith's peculiar ideas would, perhaps, have had little effect. The small world of the school-room, and the larger world in which he would afterwards have to play his part, could scarcely fail to teach him to distinguish between real and fictitious distress, and to give him the prudence which makes charity begin at home, and, indeed, too often causes it to end there. But the Goldsmiths were not ordinary people. Warm-hearted, and of large sympathy—anxious to relieve the distress of all who sued to them for aid—they were the very persons whom the prudent and prosperous are ever holding up to ridicule, as dupes and simpletons, utterly deficient in wisdom—as though there existed no other than worldly wisdom; as though "our being's end and aim" were the attainment of wealth. And here, at the very outset, we come upon the cause of many of the troubles and cares that beset Oliver Goldsmith throughout his entire career. His kindly nature led him to relieve distress wherever he found it; and, as his disposition became known, there is no doubt that distress—real and feigned—sought him out pertinaciously enough.
The words he wrote of his brother Henry, the benevolent clergyman—"passing rich on forty pounds a year"—and whose "pride" was to "relieve the wretched," might be equally applied to himself. When applicants for succour came to him—
"Careless