The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

JOHN FORSTER

Life of Goldsmith

John Forster is best remembered as writer of the biographies of the statesmen of the commonwealth, of Goldsmith, Landor, Dickens. To his own generation he was for twenty years one of the ablest of London journalists. In his later days, as a Commissioner in Lunacy, he had time to devote himself more closely to historical research. He was born at Newcastle on April 2, 1812, was turned aside from the Bar by success in newspaper work, and became editor first of the "Foreign Quarterly Review," then of the "Daily News," on which he succeeded Dickens, and lastly of "The Examiner." His "Life of Goldsmith" was published in 1848, and enlarged in 1854. Forster was different from all that he looked. He seemed harsh, exacting, and stubborn. He was one of the most loyal of friends, and tender-hearted towards all good fellows, alive or dead. His picture of Goldsmith is an understanding defence of that strangely-speckled genius, written from the heart. Forster died on February 1, 1876, two years after his retirement from official life.

I.--Misery and Ill-luck

The marble in Westminster Abbey is correct in the place, but not in the time, of the birth of Oliver Goldsmith. He was born at a small old parsonage house in an almost inaccessible Irish village called Pallas, in Longford, November 10, 1728. His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, was a Protestant clergyman with an uncertain stipend, which, with the help of some fields he farmed, averaged forty pounds a year. They who have lived, laughed, and wept with the father of the man in black in the "Citizen of the World," the preacher of "The Deserted Village," or the hero of "The Vicar of Wakefield," have given laughter, love, and tears to the Rev. Charles Goldsmith.

Oliver had not completed his second year when the family moved to a respectable house and farm on the verge of the pretty little village of Lissoy, in West Meath. Here the schoolmistress who first put a book into Oliver Goldsmith's hands confessed, "Never was so dull a boy; he seemed impenetrably stupid."

Yet all the charms of Goldsmith's later style are to be traced in the letters of his youth, and he began to scribble verses when he could scarcely write. At the age of eight he went to the Rev. Mr. Gilpin's superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, where he was considered "a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom everyone made fun of." Indeed, from his earliest youth he was made to feel an intense, uneasy consciousness of supposed defects. Later he went to school at Athlone and at Edgeworthstown, and was in every school trick, either as an actor or a victim. On leaving the school at Edgeworthstown, Oliver entered Dublin University as a sizar, "at once studying freedom and practising servitude." Little went well with him in his student course. He had a menial position, a savage brute for a tutor, and few inclinations to the study exacted. But he was not without his consolations; he could sing a song well, and, at a new insult, could blow off excitement through his flute. The popular picture of him in these days is of a slow, hesitating, somewhat hollow voice, a low-sized, thick, robust, ungainly figure, lounging about the college courts on the wait for misery and ill-luck.

In Oliver's second year at college his father died suddenly, and the scanty sum required for his support stopped. Squalid poverty relieved by occasional gifts was Goldsmith's lot thenceforward. He would write street-ballads to save himself from actual starving, sell them for five shillings a-piece, and steal out of the college at night to hear them sung. It is said to have been a rare occurrence when the five shillings reached home with him. It was more likely, when he was at his utmost need, to stop with some beggar on the road who had seemed to him even more destitute than himself.