For all that his personality was so full of faults, Goldsmith was very lovable, and with few authors has the English world felt so strong a sense of companionship. His unworldliness and guilelessness, his blundering simple goodness, even his vanity, are part of his charm. Few men have had warmer hearts, stronger feelings of sympathy and charity, or more impulsive if inconsiderate generosity. Many anecdotes are preserved testifying to his kindness of heart. A relative and fellow-student tells that when Goldsmith was at college he gave at one time the blankets off his bed to a poor woman who told him a tale of starvation and of five crying children, and him'self crept into the ticking of his mattress for shelter from the cold. His literary prominence later in life brought him a host of parasites and hangers-on, who practiced on his credulity and his benevolence. His expenses would have outstripped his income had he earned twice as much as he did, or lived twice as long. One of his most marked extravagances was for dress; he loved to trick out his homely person with finery ; but he spent much to relieve the poor and miserable. It was one of his redeeming traits that much of his prodigality was not lavished on himself.

Among his friends Goldsmith counted some of the most illustrious men of the age. He was taken into exclusive literary circles, being one of the members who formed the famous Literary Club. He met Dr. Johnson, the literary autocrat of the day, in 1761, and the latter proved a good friend to him. Other members of the club were Boswell, Johnson's biographer, David Garrick the actor, Edmund Burke the orator, and Sir Joshua Reynolds the painter. Goldsmith seems hardly to have held his own in the wit combats of the club, especially, if we may believe Boswell, with Johnson. "Poor Goldy," as he was called, did not shine in conversation, needing the additional time which the pen gave him, but he was always a general favorite.

"Was

Goldsmith died of a fever in 1774, owing two thousand pounds, a big bill at the tailor's among the others. ever," said Dr. Johnson, "a poet so trusted before?"

Place in Eighteenth Century Literature. If not perhaps the greatest, Goldsmith is one of the most pleasing and versatile writers of his century. He did hack work enough to drown the inspiration of most men; yet he stood high as an essayist, he wrote a novel of the prose-pastoral sort which has remained a classic, two of the most pleasing poems, and two of the most entertaining comedies of the age. In spite of the conservative influence of Dr. Johnson, he showed, in many respects, strong romantic tendencies. We should not look to him for work that is profound or penetrative; his education was too desultory, and his lack of exact learning too marked; nor could he succeed when he went beyond his own personal experiences. He was not a deep thinker, nor had he very strong originality or high imagination. Yet he was more original than any one else of his group dared to be; he was among the first to make domestic life interesting in a novel or a play; and, unlike most of his contemporaries, he showed a feeling human element, even in his satires. In his own place he stands secure. His work is always readable. He writes with a fastidious choice of words, if he has not wide command of them, and without a trace of effort. Part of his charm lies in the style, which is clear, animated, and charmingly familiar, and part in the gentle pathos and humanity of his work, of which more will be said later. On the whole, considering the eminent place which he takes as a poet, a prose writer, and a dramatist, he stands perhaps as the representative man of letters of the eighteenth century. Both Pope and Johnson were more dominating figures, and had wider influence, but neither was so representative in range.

GHAN 6, 1919

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INTRODUCTION 1

THE DESERTED VILLAGE

XX1

Composition and Publication. Some account of Goldsmith's manner of writing verse has been left to us by a contemporary, a young law student and friend named Cook. Goldsmith wrote verse slowly, according to Cook, "not from the tardiness of fancy, but the time he took in pointing the sentiment, and polishing the versification." Of the composition of The Deserted Village in particular we are told the following:

he first sketched a part of his design in prose, in which he threw out his ideas as they occurred to him; he then sat down carefully to versify them, correct them, and add such other ideas as he thought better fitted to the subject; and if sometimes he would exceed his prose design by writing several verses impromptu, these he would take singular pains afterwards to revise, lest they should be found unconnected with his main design. Ten lines, from the fifth to the fifteenth, had been his second morning's work; and when Cook entered his chamber he read them to him aloud. . . "Come," he added, "let me tell you this is no bad morning's work." 1

The date of this visit was May, 1768, exactly two years before the poem appeared. Thus the whole process of its composition and revision would seem to have extended over two years.

The Deserted Village was published May 26, 1770, in quarto form. "This day at twelve," announced The Public Advertiser of that date, "will be published, price two shillings, The Deserted Village, a Poem. By Dr. Goldsmith. Printed for W. Griffin, at Garrick's Head in Catherine Street, Strand." The poem met with immediate success. Five editions were published during the year, most of them containing careful revisions a second June 7, a third June 14, a fourth June 28,

:

1 European Magazine, 1793.

and a fifth August 16. What Goldsmith was paid for the poem by the bookseller who published it is not known. The sum was probably small, however;, compare 1. 414 of his apostrophe to poetry at the close of The Deserted Village; also his words to Lord Lisburn, "I cannot afford to court the draggle-tail muses, my Lord, they would let me starve; but by my other labors I can make shift to eat, drink, and have good clothes." 1

Goldsmith's Purpose in the Poem. The germ of The Deserted Village is to be found in ll. 397-412 of The Traveller, written a number of years earlier. Many of its leading ideas are to be found here and there in the essays printed in The Citizen of the World. As made clear by his introductory dedication, Goldsmith intended The Deserted Village to be an elegy over the decay of the peasantry, and an invective against the increase of luxury. He held that undue national opulence brings national corruption and national decay. In some of his economic theories the poet is not to be followed. There was no real depopulation of the country going on, as he and many others believed; rather was the contrary true; and, had there been such depopulation, it would have been erroneous to ascribe it to the increase of material prosperity, really a healthful sign, accompanying the rapid national expansion. In other respects Goldsmith is better borne out by the economic history of the time; for example, when he deplores the accumulation of land under one owner as inimical to the small farmer, of pictures the breaking up of homes consequent upon the inclosure of the commons, and the distress of the evicted wanderers. A number of such evictions he himself witnessed. The result was not, however, unless in isolated cases, the wholesale emigration of the evicted, and in several features Goldsmith's picture is probably overcolored.

1 Forster's Life, II, 209.

Auburn and Lissoy. In many respects Goldsmith draws on memories of his early life for his poem,1 and for this reason Auburn and Lissoy were early identified by critics. Lord Macaulay, on the other hand, took the ground that Auburn is an inconsistent village, assuredly not to be identified too closely with Lissoy or with any other spot. Goldsmith confuses, Macaulay says, the rural life of two countries, blending his Irish recollections and his English experiences; the village in its prosperity and happiness is English, in its unhappiness and desolation Irish. It seems now that the poet's picture of Auburn in its decline is probably truer and more English than Macaulay admits, although allowances are to be made for exaggeration, especially of contrast. Goldsmith undoubtedly makes use both of his early recollections of Lissoy and of his English observations; but he exaggerates or idealizes to suit his general purpose, and to point his moral, and very definite localizing should not be attempted.

Form. The verse form of Goldsmith's poem is the heroic couplet, consisting of two iambic pentameter lines linked by rhyme, which in the eighteenth century was the ruling poetic form. Gray departed from the couplet form in his Elegy in a Country Churchyard, printed in 1750, as had Thomson earlier; and Wordsworth and Coleridge were soon to complete the overthrow of its sovereignty, at least as written in the manner of Pope. Goldsmith was more conservative, and adhered to the classical tradition. In the handling of Chaucer, in the fourteenth century, with whom the verse form first appears, the thought is allowed to run on from line to line or from couplet to couplet, stopping somewhere within the line if the author wish; and such was the handling of the Elizabethans, or of

1 Cf. notes on ll. 12, 37, 131, 196, and others.

2 Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1903), VII, 260.