The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Оливер Голдсмит

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СКАЧАТЬ own creation of 'Croaker' with regard to this piece, and even to the last moment predicted its failure. But it was a brilliant success. More skilful in construction than The Good Natur'd Man, more various in its contrasts of character, richer and stronger in humour and vis comica, She Stoops to Conquer has continued to provide an inexhaustible fund of laughter to more than three generations of playgoers, and still bids fair to retain the character generally given to it, of being one of the three most popular comedies upon the English stage. When published, it was gratefully inscribed, in one of those admirable dedications of which its author above all men possessed the secret, to Johnson, who had befriended it from the first. 'I do not mean,' wrote Goldsmith, 'so much to compliment you as myself. It may do me some honour to inform the public, that I have lived many years in intimacy with you. It may serve the interests of mankind also to inform them, that the greatest wit may be found in a character, without impairing the most unaffected piety.'

      His gains from She Stoops to Conquer were considerable; but by this time his affairs had reached a stage of complication which nothing short of a miracle could disentangle; and there is reason for supposing that his involved circumstances preyed upon his mind. During the few months of life that remained to him he published nothing, being doubtless sufficiently occupied by the undertakings to which he was already committed. The last of his poetical efforts was the poem entitled

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      Retaliation, a group of epitaph- epigrams prompted by some similar jeux d'esprit directed against himself by Garrick and other friends, and left incomplete at his death. In March, 1774, the combined effects of work and worry, added to a local disorder, brought on a nervous fever, which he unhappily aggravated by the use of a patent medicine called 'James's Powder.' He had often relied upon this before, but in the present instance it was unsuited to his complaint. On Monday, the 4th of April, 1774, he died, in his forty-sixth year, and was buried on the 9th in the burying-ground of the Temple Church. Two years later a monument, with a medallion portrait by Nollekens, and a Latin inscription by Johnson, was erected to him in Westminster Abbey, at the expense of the Literary Club. But although the inscription contains more than one phrase of felicitous discrimination, notably the oft-quoted affectuum potens, at lenis dominator, it may be doubted whether the simpler words used by his rugged old friend in a letter to Langton are not a fitter farewell to Oliver Goldsmith—'Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man.'

      In person Goldsmith was short and strongly built. His complexion was rather fair, but he was deeply scarred with small- pox; and—if we may believe his own account—the vicissitudes and privations of his early life had not tended to diminish his initial disadvantages. 'You scarcely can conceive,' he writes to his brother in 1759, 'how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study, have worn me down. … Imagine to yourself a pale melancholy visage, with two great wrinkles between the eye-brows, with an eye disgustingly severe, and a big wig; and you may have a perfect picture of my present appearance,' i.e. at thirty years of age. 'I can neither laugh nor drink,' he goes on; 'have contracted an hesitating, disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage

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      that looks ill-nature itself; in short, I have thought myself into a settled melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it.' It is obvious that this description is largely coloured by passing depression. 'His features,' says one contemporary, 'were plain, but not repulsive—certainly not so when lighted up by conversation.' Another witness—the 'Jessamy Bride'—declares that 'his benevolence was unquestionable, and his countenance bore every trace of it.' His true likeness would seem to lie midway between the grotesquely truthful sketch by Bunbury prefixed in 1776 to the Haunch of Venison, and the portrait idealized by personal regard, which Reynolds painted in 1770. In this latter he is shown wearing, in place of his customary wig, his own scant brown hair, and, on this occasion, masquerades in a furred robe, and falling collar. But even through the disguise of a studio 'costume,' the finely-perceptive genius of Reynolds has managed to suggest much that is most appealing in his sitter's nature. Past suffering, present endurance, the craving to be understood, the mute deprecation of contempt, are all written legibly in this pathetic picture. It has been frequently copied, often very ineffectively, for so subtle is the art that the slightest deviation hopelessly distorts and vulgarizes what Reynolds has done supremely, once and for ever.

      Goldsmith's character presents but few real complexities. What seems most to have impressed his contemporaries is the difference, emphasized by the happily-antithetic epigram of Garrick, between his written style and his conversation; and collaterally, between his eminence as a literary man and his personal insignificance. Much of this is easily intelligible. He had started in life with few temporal or physical advantages, and with a native susceptibility that intensified his defects. Until

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      he became a middle-aged man, he led a life of which we do not even now know all the degradations; and these had left their mark upon his manners. With the publication of The Traveller, he became at once the associate of some of the best talent and intellect in England—of fine gentlemen such as Beauclerk and Langton, of artists such as Reynolds and Garrick, of talkers such as Johnson and Burke. Morbidly self-conscious, nervously anxious to succeed, he was at once forced into a competition for which neither his antecedents nor his qualifications had prepared him. To this, coupled with the old habit of poverty, must be attributed his oft-cited passion for fine clothes, which surely arose less from vanity than from a mistaken attempt to extenuate what he felt to be his most obvious shortcomings. As a talker especially he was ill-fitted to shine. He was easily disconcerted by retort, and often discomfited in argument. To the end of his days he never lost his native brogue; and (as he himself tells us) he had that most fatal of defects to a narrator, a slow and hesitating manner. The perspicuity which makes the charm of his writings deserted him in conversation; and his best things were momentary flashes. But some of these were undoubtedly very happy. His telling Johnson that he would make the little fishes talk like whales; his affirmation of Burke that he wound into a subject like a serpent; and half-a-dozen other well-remembered examples—afford ample proof of this. Something of the uneasy jealousy he is said to have exhibited with regard to certain of his contemporaries may also be connected with the long probation of obscurity during which he had been a spectator of the good fortune of others, to whom he must have known himself superior. His improvidence seems to have been congenital, since it is to be traced 'even from his boyish days.' But though it cannot justly be ascribed to any

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      reaction from want to sufficiency, it can still less be supposed to have been diminished by that change. If he was careless of money, it must also be remembered that he gave much of it away; and fortune lingers little with those whose ears are always open to a plausible tale of distress. Of his sensibility and genuine kindheartedness there is no doubt. And it is well to remember that most of the tales to his disadvantage come, not from his more distinguished companions, but from such admitted detractors as Hawkins and Boswell. It could be no mean individuality that acquired the esteem, and deserved the regret, of Johnson and Reynolds.

      In an edition of Goldsmith's poems, any extended examination of his remaining productions would be out of place. Moreover, the bulk of these is considerably reduced when all that may properly be classed as hack-work has been withdrawn. The histories of Greece, of Rome, and of England; the Animated Nature; the lives of Nash, Voltaire, Parnell, and Bolingbroke, are merely compilations, only raised to the highest level in that line because they proceeded from a man whose gift of clear and easy exposition lent a charm to everything he touched. With the work which he did for himself, the case is different. Into The Citizen of the World, The Vicar of Wakefield, and his two comedies, he put all the best of his knowledge of human nature, his keen sympathy with his kind, his fine common-sense and his genial humour. The same qualities, tempered by a certain grace and tenderness, also enter into the best of his poems. Avoiding the epigram of Pope and the austere couplet СКАЧАТЬ