The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith

consciousness that he must himself stand at the same bar.

1759.

"This decay which criticism produces may be deplored, but Et. 31.

'can scarcely be remedied, as the man who writes against "the critics is obliged to add himself to the number."* Nevertheless, it was with manly self-assertion of attainments which raised him above the herd, that he afterwards scornfully disclaimed that viler brotherhood. "I fire with indignation when I see persons wholly destitute of education and genius indent to the press, and thus turn book"makers, adding to the sin of criticism the sin of ignorance "also; whose trade is a bad one, and who are bad workmen "in the trade." So much was not to be said of his workmanship, by even the deity of the Dunciad-the contriver of books to be made, the master-employer in the miserable craft, Griffiths himself.

And thus comes upon the scene that other arch-foe, to whom, in modern days, the literary craftsman is but minister and servant. The critic or sophist might have been contriver of all harms, while the field of mischief was his own, and limited to a lecture-room of Athens or Alexandria; but he bowed to a more potent spirit of evil when the man of Paternoster Row or the Poultry came up in later days, took literature into charitable charge, and assumed exclusive direction of laws of taste and men of learning. Drawing on a hard experience, Goldsmith depicted the "precarious subsistence" and daily fate of the bookseller's workman: "coming down at stated intervals "to rummage the bookseller's counter for materials to work upon:" a fate which other neglects now made inevitable. "The author," Goldsmith had previously said, “when unpatronised by the great, has naturally recourse to the

1759.

Et. 31.

"bookseller. There cannot perhaps be imagined a com"bination more prejudicial to taste than this. It is the "interest of the one to allow as little for writing, and of the "other to write as much, as possible; accordingly tedious "compilations and periodical magazines are the result of "their joint endeavours. In these circumstances the "author bids adieu to fame, writes for bread, and for that

only imagination is seldom called in; he sits down to "address the venal muse with the most phlegmatic apathy; and, as we are told of the Russian, courts his mistress by falling asleep in her lap. His reputation never spreads "in a wider circle than that of the trade, who generally "value him, not for the fineness of his compositions, but

the quantity he works off in a given time. A long habit "of writing for bread thus turns the ambition of every "author at last into avarice. He finds that he has written "many years, that the public are scarcely acquainted even "with his name; he despairs of applause, and turns to profit which invites him. He finds that money procures all those advantages, that respect, and that ease which he "vainly expected from fame. Thus the man who under "the protection of the great might have done honour to "humanity, when only patronised by the bookseller, becomes "a thing little superior to the fellow who works at the press."* In connection with this unpromising picture, in his following chapter, he placed "the two literary reviews "in London, with critical newspapers and magazines without "number;" remarking in another place that, "were these 'Monthly Reviews and Magazines frothy, pert, or absurd, they might find some pardon; but to be dull and dronish "is an encroachment on the prerogative of a folio."+ For

one example of the evil, he instanced the power of a single 1759. monosyllable in these productions, to express the victory Et.31. over humour amongst us, from which no one in later years was to suffer as much as himself. "Does the poet paint "the absurdities of the vulgar, then he is low: does he exaggerate the features of folly to render it more thoroughly ridiculous, he is then very low." And he laughingly suggested (but this joke he confined to his first edition) that check might possibly be given to it by some such law "enacted in the republic of letters as we find "takes effect in the House of Commons. As no man there can show his wisdom, unless qualified by three hundred pounds a-year, so none here should possess gravity, unless his work amounted to three hundred pages." In other parts of the treatise he guards himself from being supposed to wish that a mere money-service, a system of flattery and beggary, should replace that of the booksellers. He would object, he says, to indigence and effrontery subjecting

* How admirable are his remarks on style, in the same chapter! "It were to "be wished that we no longer found pleasure with the inflated stile that has "for some years been looked upon as fine writing, and which every young writer "is now obliged to adopt, if he chooses to be read. . it is not those who make "the greatest noise with their wares in the streets that have most to sell. Let us, "instead of writing finely, try to write naturally; not hunt after lofty expressions "to deliver mean ideas, nor be for ever gaping, when we only mean to deliver a "whisper." Not against Johnson was this levelled, however, but at the swarm of empty imitators begotten of Johnson's success. The author of the Rambler would think ail the more highly of Goldsmith for such remarks. No one better knew his own defects, or made more candid avowal of them. "Sir,' he said to Boswell, "if Robertson's style be faulty, he owes it to me; that is, having too many words, and those too big ones." Life, vi. 316. So when Langton one day read one of his Ramblers to him, and asked him how he liked it, he shook his head, and said, "Too wordy." Ib. vii. 353. Langton also tells us that at another time, when a friend was reading his tragedy of Irene to a company at a house in the country, he left the room; and somebody having asked him the reason of this, he replied, "Sir, I thought it had been better." Ibid. In these personal matters, as in all others, so far as his views and judgment carried him, Johnson was a just and righteous man. Boswell often bored him to say that he thought Goldsmith his imitator; but he would not, nor would he allow others to Bay it. + Chap. xi.

1759.

learning itself to the contempts incurred by its professors; Et. 31. but he would no more have an author draw a quill merely to take a purse, than present a pistol for the same purpose.*

These passages in the Enquiry were startling, and not to be protected from notice by even the obscurity of the writer. They struck at the seat of a monstrous evil. "We must observe," said Smollett, noticing the book in the Critical Review, "that, against his own conviction, this "author has indiscriminately censured the two Reviews; "confounding a work undertaken from public spirit, with

one supported for the sordid purposes of a bookseller.— "It might not become us to say more on this subject."+ The sordid bookseller was not so delicate, and did say much more; calling in for the purpose the pen of Kenrick, a notorious and convicted libeller. "It requires a good deal "of art and temper," said the Monthly Review, after objections to the whole treatise, some just enough, on the score of its want of learning and too hasty decision on national literatures, others, connected with the subject of patronage, shallow as they were severe," for a man to write "consistently against the dictates of his own heart. Thus,

notwithstanding our Author talks so familiarly of us, the "great, and affects to be thought to stand in the rank of "Patrons, we cannot help thinking that in more places than "one he has betrayed, in himself, the man he so severely "condemns for drawing his quill to take a purse. We are

even so firmly convinced of this, that we dare put the "question home to his conscience, whether he never experienced the unhappy situation he so feelingly describes. "in that of a Literary Understrapper? His remarking "him as coming down from his garret, to rummage the

"bookseller's shop, for materials to work upon, and the

1759.

knowledge he displays of his minutest labours, give great t. 31. reason to suspect" (generous and forbearing Griffiths!) he may himself have had concerns in the bad trade of bookmaking. Fronti nulla fides. We have heard of many “a Writer, who, 'patronised only by his bookseller,' has "nevertheless affected the Gentleman in print, and talked

full as cavalierly as our Author himself. We have even "known one hardy enough* publicly to stigmatise men of "the first rank in literature, for their immoralities, while "conscious himself of labouring under the infamy of having,

by the vilest and meanest actions, forfeited all pretensions "to honour and honesty. If such men as these, boasting a liberal education, and pretending to genius, practise at "the same time those arts which bring the Sharper to the "cart's-tail or the pillory, need our Author wonder that 'learning partakes the contempt of its professors.'

66 6

"characters of this stamp are to be found among the

learned, need any one be surprised that the great prefer "the society of Fiddlers, Gamesters, and Buffoons? "+

* Kenrick has the mock decency here to subjoin in a note exactly that kind of affected disclaimer of any personal allusion to Goldsmith in this particular passage, which fixes the offence charged more expressly upon him. "Even our author," he says, 66 seems to have wandered into calumny when he speaks of the Marquis "d'Argens as attempting to add the character of a philosopher to the vices of a "debauchee." That he was himself intended would require no clearer evidence to Goldsmith's mind than the identity of the expression-sharper-with the "sharper and villain" of Griffiths's letter, ante, p. 170.

+ Monthly Review, xxi. 389, November 1759. Can any one doubt that these painful passages in Goldsmith's history were vividly present with him two years later, when his man in black, talking of genius and its rewards among the tombs of Westminster Abbey, surprised the Chinese citizen by describing a class of men who "have no other employment but to cry out Dunce, and Scribbler; to "praise the dead and revile the living; to grant a man of confessed abilities some small share of merit; to applaud twenty blockheads, in order to gain the "reputation of candour; and to revile the moral character of the man whose writings they cannot injure. Such wretches are kept in pay by some mercenary "bookseller, or more frequently the bookseller himself takes this dirty work off "their hands, as all that is required is to be very abusive and very dull." Citizen of the World, xiii.

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