CHAPTER X. 1764. THE TRAVELLER AND WHAT FOLLOWED IT. 1764-1765. "THIS day is published," said the Public Advertiser of the Et. 36. 19th of December 1764,"price one shilling and sixpence, "The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society, a Poem. By "Oliver Goldsmith, M.B. Printed for J. Newbery in "St. Paul's Church Yard." It was the first time that Goldsmith had announced his name in connection with anything he had written; and with it he had resolved to associate his brother Henry's name. To him he dedicated the poem. From the midst of the poverty which Henry could least alleviate, and turning from the celebrated men with whose favour his own fortunes were bound up, he addressed the friend and companion of his infancy, to whom, in all his sufferings and wanderings, his heart, untravelled and unsullied, had still lovingly gone back. "The friendship between us can acquire no new force from the ceremonies of a Dedication," he said; "but as a part of this poem 66 was formerly written to you from Switzerland, the whole can now, with propriety, be only inscribed to you. It "will also throw light upon many parts of it, when the "reader understands that it is addressed to a man, who, 66 1764. despising fame and fortune, has retired early to happiness "and obscurity with an income of forty pounds a year. Et. 36. "I now perceive, my dear brother," continued Goldsmith, with affecting significance," the wisdom of your humble "choice. You have entered upon a sacred office, where the "harvest is great, and the labourers are but few; while you "have left the field of ambition, where the labourers are many, and the harvest not worth carrying away." Such as the harvest was, however, he was at last himself about to gather it in. He proceeded to describe to his brother the object of his poem, as an attempt to show that there may be equal happiness in states that are differently governed from our own, that every state has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess: but he expressed a strong doubt, since he had not taken a political "side," whether its freedom from individual and party abuse would not wholly bar its success. While he wrote, he might have quieted that fear. As the poem was passing through the press, Churchill died. It was he who had pressed poetry into the service of party, and for the last three years, to apparent exclusion of every nobler theme, made harsh political satire the favoured utterance of the Muse. But his rude strong spirit had suddenly given way. Those unsubdued passions; those principles, unfettered rather than depraved; that real manliness of soul, scorn of convention, and unquestioned courage; that open heart and liberal hand; that eager readiness to love or to hate, to strike or to embrace, had passed away for ever. Nine days earlier, his antagonist Hogarth had gone the same dark journey; and the reconciliation that would surely, even here, have sooner or later vindicated their common genius, the hearty 1764. Æt. 36. English feeling which they shared, and their common cordial hatred of the falsehoods and pretences of the world, was left to be accomplished in the grave.* Be it not the least shame of the profligate politics of these three disgraceful years, that, arraying in bitter hostility one section of the kingdom against the other, they turned into unscrupulous personal enemies such men as these; made a patriot of Wilkes; statesmen of Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Sandwich, and Bubb Dodington; and, of the free and vigorous verse of Churchill, a mere instrument of perishable faction. Not without reason on that ground did Goldsmith condemn and scorn it. It was that which had made it the rare mixture it so frequently is, of the artificial with the natural and impulsive; which so fitfully blended in its author the wholly and the partly true; which impaired his force of style with prosaical weakness; and controlled, by the necessities of partisan satire, his feeling for nature and for truth. Yet should his critic and fellow-poet have paused before, in this dedication to the Traveller, he branded him as a writer of lampoons. To Charles Hanbury Williams, but not to Charles Churchill, such epithets belong. The senators who met to decide the fate of turbots were not worthier of the wrath and the scourge of Juvenal, than the men who, reeking from the gross indulgences of Medmenhamabbey, drove out William Pitt from the cabinet, sat down by the side of Bute, denounced in the person of Wilkes their own old profligate associate, and took the public morality into keeping. Never, that he might merely fawn upon power or trample upon weakness, had Churchill let loose his pen. There was not a form of mean pretence or servile assumption, which he did not use it to denounce. Low, pimping * The present writer may here avow the authorship of an article on Churchill in the Edinburgh Review (lxxxi. 46-88), in which this view is taken in more detail. 1764. politics, he abhorred; and that their worthless abettors, to whose exposure his works are so incessantly devoted, have Et 36. not carried him into oblivion with themselves, argues something for the sound morality and permanent truth expressed in his manly verse. By these the new poet was to profit; as much as by the faults which perished with the satirist, and left the lesson of avoidance to his successors. In the interval since Pope's and Thomson's death, since Collins's faint sweet song, since the silence of Young, of Akenside, and of Gray, no such easy, familiar, and vigorous verse as Churchill's, had dwelt in the public ear. The less likely was it now to turn away, impatient or intolerant of the Traveller. Johnson pronounced it a poem to which it would not be easy to find anything equal, since the death of Pope. Though covering but the space of twenty years,* this was praise worth coveting, and was honestly deserved. The elaborate care and skill of the verse, the exquisite choice and selectness of the diction, at once recalled to others, as to Johnson, the master so lately absolute in the realms of verse; and with these there was a rich harmony of tone, a softness and simplicity of touch, a happy and playful tenderness, which belonged peculiarly to the later poet. With a less pointed and practised force of understanding than in Pope, and in some respects less subtle and refined, the appeal to the heart in Goldsmith is more gentle, direct, and pure. The predominant impression of the Traveller is of its naturalness and facility; and then is felt the surpassing charm with which its every-day genial fancies invest high thoughts of human happiness. The serene graces of its style, and the mellow flow of its verse, take us captive, before we feel the enchantment of its lovely images of various * Pope died in 1744. 1764. life, reflected from its calm still depths of philosophic conEt. 36. templation. Above all do we perceive that it is a poem built upon nature; that it rests upon honest truth; that it is not crying to the moon and the stars for impossible sympathy, or dealing with other worlds, in fact or imagination, than the writer has himself lived in and known. Wisely had Goldsmith avoided, what, in the false-heroic versifiers of his day, he had wittily condemned; the practice, even commoner since, of building up poetry on fantastic unreality, of clothing it in harsh inversions of language, and of patching it out with affectations of by-gone vivacity: " as if the more "it was unlike prose, the more it would resemble poetry.” Making allowance for a brief expletive rarely scattered here and there, his poetical language is unadorned yet rich, select yet exquisitely plain, condensed yet home-felt and familiar. He has considered, as he says himself of Parnell," the language of poetry as the language of life, and conveys the warmest thoughts in the simplest expression."* In what way the Traveller originated, the reader has seen. It does not seem necessary to discuss in what precise proportions its plan may have risen out of Addison's Letter from Italy. Shaped in any respect by Thomson's remark, in one of his letters to Bubb Dodington, "that a poetical landscape of countries, mixed with moral observations on their characters "and people, would not be an ill-judged undertaking,” it certainly could not have been; † for that letter was not made 66 * Miscell. Works, iii. 374. + Sir Egerton Brydges has pointed out some resemblance of topics, and a similar union of contemplation and description, in a now forgotten poem of the hardlytreated Blackmore; but there is nothing in the latter (the Nature of Man) to suggest anything like imitation. The only couplet quoted having any resemblance to the turns of Goldsmith's verse is where Blackmore says of the French, "Still in extremes their passions they employ Abject their grief, and insolent their joy." But this was not peculiar to Blackmore. See Mitford's Life of Goldsmith, lxi. |