CHAPTER V. 1758. Æt. 30. DISCIPLINE OF SORROW. 1758-1759. It was four days after the rejection at Surgeons' Hall, the Christmas day of 1758, when, to the ordinary filth and noise of number twelve in Green Arbour Court, there was added an unusual lamentation and sorrow. An incident had occurred, of which, painful as were the consequences involved in it, the precise details can but be surmised and guessed at, and must be received with that allowance, though doubtless in the main correct. It would appear that the keeper of this wretched lodging had been suddenly dragged by bailiffs from his home on the previous night, and his wife, with loud wailings, now sought the room of her poorer lodger. He was in debt to the unfortunate couple, who, for the amusement of their children by his flute, had been kind to him according to their miserable means: and it was the woman's sobbing petition that he should try to help them. There was but one way; and in the hope, through Hamilton or Griffiths, to be able still to meet the tailor's debt, the gay suit in which he went to Surgeons' Hall, and in which he was dressed for his doleful holiday, appears to have been put off and carried to the pawnbroker's. Nor had a week passed, before the pangs of his own destitution sharply 1758. struck him again; and, without other remaining means of Et. 30. earthly aid, for death had taken in Doctor Milner his apparently last friend, he carried the four books he had recently reviewed for Griffiths to a neighbouring house, and left them in pledge with an acquaintance for a trifling loan.* It was hardly done when a letter from Griffiths was put into his hand, peremptorily demanding the return of the books and the suit of clothes, or instant payment for both. Goldsmith's answer, and the bookseller's violent retort, are to be presumed from the poor debtor's second letter: the only one preserved of this unseemly correspondence. He appears first to have written in a tone of mixed astonishment, anger, and solicitation; to have prayed for some delay; and to have been met by coarse insult, threats, and the shameless imputation of crime. These forced from him the rejoinder found in the bookseller's papers, endorsed by Griffiths with the writer's name, and as "Reed. in Jan" 1759;" which passed afterwards into the manuscript collections of Mr. Heber, and is now in my possession. All concealment is ended here, and stern plain truth is told. "Sir," wrote Goldsmith, "I know of no misery but a gaol to which my own imprudencies and your letter seem to point. I have seen it "inevitable these three or four weeks, and, by heavens! request it as "a favour, as a favour that may prevent somewhat more fatal. I * Prior, i. 326-8. + The appearance of this remarkable letter harmonises with its contents. There is nothing of the freedom or boldness of hand in it which one may perceive in his ordinary manuscript. To the kindness of my friend the Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend, I owe the possession of this most interesting of all the Goldsmith papers that have been preserved to our time, and I have been careful of the strictest accuracy in the copy above given. The pointing is imperfect and confused, nor is there any break or paragraph from the first line to the signature; but it is printed exactly as written. 1758. Æt. 30. "have been some years struggling with a wretched being, with all 66 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. "P.S. I shall expect impatiently the result of your resolutions." Now, this Ralph Griffiths the bookseller, whom the diploma of some American university as obscure as himself made subsequently Doctor Griffiths, was one of the most thriving men of the day. In little more than three years after this he was able to retire from bookselling, and hand over to Becket the publication of his Review. As time wore on, he became a more and more regular attendant at the meeting-house, rose higher and higher in the world's esteem, and at last kept his two carriages, and "lived in style." But he lived, too, to see the changes of thirty years after the grave had received the author of the Vicar of Wakefield; and though he had some recollections of the errors of his youth to disturb his decorous and religious peace of mind,-such as having become the proprietor of an infamous novel, and dictated the praise of it in his Review,—such as having exposed himself to a remark reiterated in Grainger's letters to Bishop Percy, that he was not to be trusted in any verbal agreement upon matters of his trade,*-it may not have been the least bitter of his remembrances, if it ever happened to occur to him, that to Oliver Goldsmith, in the depths of a helpless distress, he had applied the epithets of sharper and villain. From Goldsmith himself they fell harmless. His letter is most affecting: but the truth is manfully outspoken in it, and for that reason it is less painful to me than those in which the truth is concealed. When such a mind is brought to look its sorrow in the face, and understand clearly the condition in which it is,—without further doubling, shrinking, or weak compromise with false hopes,-it is master of a great gain. In the accession of strength it receives, it may see the sorrow anyway increase, and calm its worst apprehension. The most touching passage of that letter is the reference to his project, and the bright side of his mind it may reveal. I will date from it the true beginning of "You must have little dependence upon Griffiths. Do not go on with him "without a positive bargain, &c. &c." Grainger to Percy, Nichols's Illustrations, vii. 259. 1758. Et. 30. 1758. Æt. 30. Goldsmith's literary career. Not till he was past thirty, he was wont to say, did he become really attached to literature: not till then was the discipline of his endurance complete, his wandering impulses settled firmly to the right object of their aptitude, or his real destiny revealed to him. He might have still to perish in unconquered difficulties, and with the word that was in him unspoken; but it would be at his post, and in a manly effort to speak the word. Whatever the personal weaknesses that yet remain,-nor are they few or trifling, his confidence and self-reliance in literary pursuits date from this memorable time. They rise above the cares and cankers of his life, above the lowness of his worldly esteem, far above the squalor of his homes. They take the undying forms which accident or wrong cannot alter or deface; they are the tenants of a world where distress and failure are unknown; and perpetual cheerfulness sings around them. "The night can never endure so long, but "at length the morning cometh ;" and with these sudden and sharp disappointments of his second London Christmas, there came into Green Arbour Court the first struggling beams of morning. Till all its brightness follows, let him moan and sorrow as he may ;-the more familiar to himself he makes those images of want and danger, the better he will meet them in the lists where they still await him; the more he cultivates those solitary friendships with the dead, the more elevating and strengthening the influence that will reward him from their graves. The living, busy, prosperous world about him, might indeed have saved him much, by stretching forth its helping hand: but it had not taught him little in its lesson of unrequited expectation, and there was nothing now to distract him with delusive hope from meditation of the wisest form of revenge. |