THOMAS GRAY, CHRISTOPHER SMART, OLIVER GOLDSMITH
It is not surprising that Thomas Gray’s “Ode to Adversity” appealed to Doctor Johnson. It is a poem about endurance, and the Doctor admired the efficiency of the writing and Gray’s “sentence,” or meaning. It is not a poem characteristic of Gray who, though he can be solemn, never smells of dust and dirty linen.
As boys at Eton, Gray (Orozmades), Celadon (Horace Walpole), Favonius or Zephyrus (Richard West) and Almanzor (Thomas Ashton) established the Quadruple Alliance, coming together in mutual hatred of the sporting fraternity and a shared love for classical poetry. Gray, often ill at ease in general company, found fortitude and self-assurance in subgroups. Shrill-voiced, witty and playfully inventive among friends, to the world at large he presented an austere façade. At seventeen, soon after he went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, he sent Celadon a poem he says he got off the ghost of John Dennis after a visit to the Devil Tavern. Poet, dramatist and critic, Dennis had been sent up by Pope in The Dunciad. He had died earlier in the year and his memory was warm enough to kindle mild satire. Gray’s conceit is that Walpole conjured the ghost, who gives an echo account of his worldly existence.
That little, naked, melancholy thing,
My soul, when first she tried her flight to wing,
Began with speed new regions to explore,
And blundered through a narrow postern door.
First most devoutly having said its prayers,
It tumbled down a thousand pairs of stairs...
The casual nature of the composition is clear: the soul is “she” then “it,” ungendered in a careless transition. At last it arrives in a weird metropolitan Elysium: “Here spirit-beaux flutter along the Mall.” Dennis tires, abandoning description, but adding a lewdly adolescent postscriptum:
Lucrece for half a crown will show you fun,
But Mrs Oldfield is become a nun.
Nobles and cits, Prince Pluto and his spouse
Flock to the ghost of Covent-Garden House:
Plays, which were hissed above, below revive;
When dead applauded that were damned alive...
There’s no solemnity in sight; and though the poem achieves at its best an impeccably decorous manner, the figure who shaped it, not a happy man, was capable of deep friendship and lighthearted good cheer.
Not a happy man: such a verdict supposes that modern readers can glean from the facts of a life something of its subjective quality. If that quality is not patent in the poems, have we a right to presume? Surmises about poets of the eighteenth century are especially hard because their hearts, when worn on their sleeves, were usually frilled with lace, and as often as not decorously disguised. Direct expression is what many of them, and Gray in particular, longed to risk: some way of naming objects in the world and passions in the heart. Hence his attraction to all the experiments and forgeries that claimed to emanate from a world of feeling and language beyond the confines of Augustan diction and received form.
In climes beyond the solar road,
Where shaggy forms o’er ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
To cheer the shivering native’s dull abode.
The ignis fatuus he pursued was the pseudo-primitive; in it he found space—however spurious—to breathe a different air. For Coleridge he seldom breathed real air at all; most of his lyrics are “frigid and artificial.” Coleridge has a point and should be answered, “Yes, but...”
Doctor Johnson’s best poetry is imitation of Juvenal and Horace. It is improper for the poet to pretend to originality. He prefers transposition, restatement in a new context of proven, especially classical, work. Other Augustan poets took “imitation” differently, in the spirit that led T. S. Eliot to weave his verse out of new thread mingled with strands from other works. Eliot, often in ironic spirit, borrows to define his themes. Gray, without programmatic irony, “imitated” in this spirit. His critics and the poet himself annotated the “sources” of many lines. Roger Lonsdale, a great editor of our time, writes, “One seems at times to be confronting a kind of literary kleptomania, such is his dependence on the phrasing and thoughts of other poets.” He’s most original in the extent of his derivativeness, his tactful borrowing, from Greek, Latin, English and other writers. William Collins runs him a close second.
Gray turns in his early verse less to Pope and Dryden and more to Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton for metaphor and organization. This underlines a dissatisfaction with the narrow frontiers of Augustan verse.
But not to one in this benighted age
Is that diviner inspiration given,
That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,
The pomp and prodigality of heaven.
His enthusiasm for Thomson’s The Seasons (in which he sensed, as we no longer can, an actual nature alive), for James Macpherson’s Ossianic forgeries, for the “primitive” Celtic poets, and his longing to infuse primal energy into the effete literary tyrannies of his day, his interest even in the absurd Pindaric mode, all reflect dissatisfaction, a casting about for a way through and out. Some of his poems, including “The Fatal Sisters,” “The Descent of Odin” and “The Bard,” imitate Welsh and Norse poetry. He could not make the break: he strove to regenerate poetry only from poetry. He never wrote, he said, “without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously.” His best poems are not those labored “original” compositions, but the thoroughly Augustan pieces, above all the elegies.
A poeta doctus, or learned poet, he translated passages of Statius, Tasso and Propertius. Most of his waking hours were spent in study. He attempted a blank-verse tragedy in Agrippina. In all, he produced relatively little poetry, some of it in Latin and Greek. His debt to Dante, whom he imitated in the opening of the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” is great: he understood the Florentine better than any other Augustan and went so far in his early twenties as to translate the cruel, moving Ugolino passage in which a father devours his own children. He employs not Dante’s terza rima but a blank verse that recalls now Milton, now Spenser. The story itself touched a deep nerve in him, the sole survivor in a family of twelve children: the drama and grim pathos are communicated in something like a speaking voice.
He was born in 1716 in Cornhill. His father was a scrivener—in an earlier age he might have been a scribe—and his mother and aunt kept a milliner’s shop. They prospered and gave him the best education their money could buy. In 1735 he was admitted to the Inner Temple. His intention was to pursue a legal career. In 1739 he embarked on a tour of France and Italy with Walpole. A falling out with his friend hastened his return to England in 1741. They remained estranged for four years but then became faster friends than ever.Walpole commissioned a portrait of Gray at thirty-one. He holds the manuscript of the Eton poem: a fair likeness, the lips tight, gentle almost smiling eyes, a handsome straight nose; the collar open, casually disarranged—a boyish Gray, the person Walpole held dear from school days.
Several bereavements marked him deeply, and his father’s death in 1741 left him financially insecure. The law lost its attraction. He settled back at Cambridge, first at Peterhouse, later at Pembroke College, and apart from a few absences—in London for research, Stoke Poges for relaxation with his family, York and the Lakes for rambles—he remained in Cambridge until his death in 1771. In 1768, after a long campaign, he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History. He engaged in university politics and stooped to partisan satire in “The Candidate,” a poem that distressed his admirers by its vulgarity. He rhymed the word “bitches” with “stitches” (a term for lying with a woman).
Shortly before his return to Cambridge his poetic energies were released, possibly by the force of bereavement. In 1742 he completed the “Ode on the Spring,” his first important composition, a confident mastery of pure convention. The verse, as Roger Lonsdale says, is entirely self-conscious, moralizing the subject and moralizing the moralizing convention as well, as if to undercut itself. “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” is a finer poem, his first to appear in print, full of the anxiety personal losses induced (including the death of Richard West). The intricate ten-line stanza form in tetrameters and trimeters is taut and understated. It is a “topographical poem,” relating to an actual prospect—from his uncle’s summer house in Stoke Poges he could look across the Thames to Windsor and Eton—but the poetic prospect is across time, into the past. The view provokes elegy, not without bitterness. This is the most transparently subjective of his poems. The pessimism of a worldly-wise man surveying innocent youth leads to a final stanza whose terrible force Keats and Wilde were to echo:
To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another’s pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
’Tis folly to be wise.
So negative a view receives correction in the “Ode to Adversity:”
Thy form benign, oh Goddess, wear,
Thy milder influence impart,
Thy philosophic train be there
To soften, not to wound my heart.
The generous spark extinct revive,
Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are to feel, and know myself a man.
Solemn, certainly. He struck other notes from his classic lyre. Walpole’s cat drowned in a goldfish bowl, an accident that produced one of the best animal fables, or elegies, in English, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat,” satirizing the character of woman. Walpole superintended Gray’s publications from his Strawberry Hill Press, whose chief activity was to publish Walpole’s own works, The Castle of Otranto, a gothic novella, and his writing on painting and history. The Strawberry Hill books are the product of a kind of vanity, Walpole’s desire to control not only language but its dissemination. He didn’t distribute them widely. He was a make-believe publisher, some of whose dreams survive.
Walpole was available for consultation on the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Gray completed in 1750 at his uncle’s house in Stoke Poges. The success of this great poem became irksome to him. He was after another sort of originality, yet his later work was criticized in the light of the definitive Augustan achievement. He married in this poem two incongruous but mutually attractive styles: the sedate, tidy elegiac and a Miltonic rhetoric.
We may at first balk at the welter of present participles—more than ten in the first twenty-one lines—or at Gray’s tendency to define by negatives, but participles suggest continuation in time and evoke a natural process; definition by negatives implies what they specifically exclude, so the poem evokes what is not, even as it portrays what is. The quatrains function rather like extended couplets: most of them have the finality of epigram.
The “Elegy” animates the conventional with actual observation; a literal and a formal world come together and agree. If his success is, in Leavis’s words, “of taste, of literary sense” rather than “of creative talent,” what good sense, what good taste! The distinction is hardly relevant to the poem we have. It is invidious to suggest that taste and sense at such a level of achievement are not a form of “creative talent.” Johnson’s judgment, that the poem “abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo,” is borne out by the popularity of the work and the number of passages and lines that have entered common speech. Robert Wells calls it “many poems in one. I admire the way that it unfolds and surprises itself. The strong wayward current of its rhetoric is exploratory. Just over half-way through (with the stanza ‘Yet ev’n these bones...’) Gray veers away from the conclusion he had originally planned, and re-enters his subject, to discover the unwritten poem standing at the edge of the one he has been writing, a preoccupation at variance with his conscious theme.” The concerns that hover at the edge of the “Elegy” are personal: Gray is a man of homosexual temperament inhabiting a world rich in all things, not least denials. His feeling for what Wells calls “suppressed potential” has personal resonance, the “preoccupation which steals up on [his] first theme, changing the course of the ‘Elegy,’ is the need for answered affection and the presence of a ‘kindred spirit,’ for the knowledge that a real meeting has taken place this side of the grave.” It is the theme of the Eton poem more subtly and fully developed, more consolingly accepted.
Gray, Johnson says, “thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from common use.” The odes are vitiated by “a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away... glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments... they strike, rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is laboured into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence.” This is the case with Gray’s experimental works and can be explained by his desire to suggest energy where he felt none, to drum up a passion but without motive force. Donald Davie identifies the fault: “Gray seems to have been distinguished by low vitality.” He does not pour forth his verse, even in his vatic poems. He labors line by line.
Low vitality meant that major schemes were abandoned: the projected “History of English Poetry,” for which he composed “The Progress of Poesy,” a species of translatio regni of poetry from classical cultures to England, with due praise for English liberty, though not in the complacent tones of Thomson. To Thomas Warton he handed on his plan and notes for the “History,” and Warton incorporated much of Gray, though he went his own way and achieved his own incomplete book. Later Gray wrote “The Bard,” a poem whose lack of inner dynamic produces effects similar to those in Blake’s most eloquent visions, where an excessive dynamic fragments the work and leads to ill-judged absurdities. Inevitably Gray returned to translation, to recharge his batteries.
He was indebted to earlier poets, but he is a creditor to many successors. Wordsworth owes him some debts in phrasing, image and theme, especially in “Hymn to Ignorance,” and a negative debt, for Gray was a poet against whom he could react in formulating his own practice and theory of poetic diction. Goldsmith owes Gray specific debts. “The Alliance of Education and Government” is not generically remote from Goldsmith’s much better poems, “The Traveller” and “The Deserted Village.” Goldsmith’s verse is less preconceived than Gray’s, less careful, more impassioned.
T. S. Eliot says that the second-rate among eighteenth-century poets were those who, disaffected with conventional modes, “were incompetent to find a style of writing for themselves.” Gray tried, but lack of energy let him down. His formidable conventional skills do not suggest that he could have been other than he was. What he is—as a letter writer as well as a poet—attests to the positive, learned virtues of an age, but also to its limitations. There is no acceptable space for such a man to live a full life. The “Elegy” remains, and anyone who cares for poetry will enjoy it. Read in the light of his life, it reveals as much about him as The Waste Land does about Eliot. The most “impersonal” poets, those who borrow voices and wear elusive masks, regarded attentively are often terrifyingly candid.
On Margate sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
Christopher Smart, Robert Graves tells us, “wrote A Song to David in a lunatic asylum, and when his collected poems were published in 1791, it was omitted as ‘not acceptable to the reader.’ This poem is formally addressed to David—Smart knew that he was no madder than King David had been, and a tradition survives that he scrabbled the verses with a key on the wall of his cell.” However they were written, they remain a wonder and a mystery, begotten of the Bible, of broad and deep learning, and of some catalyst that made a confusion that the poet resolved, against chaos as it were, to put in some sort of order.
For the word of God is a sword on my side—no matter what other weapon a stick or a straw.
For I have adventured myself in the name of the Lord, and he hath marked me for his own.
For I bless God the Postmaster general & all conveyancers of letters under his care especially Allen & Shelvock.
For my grounds in New Canaan shall infinitely compensate for the flats & maynes of Staindrop Moor.
For the praise of God can give to a mute fish the notes of a nightingale.
Is it nonsense? Yes. Is it nonsense? No. “It is not impossible that when Smart is judged over the whole range of his various productions—conventional in form as well as unconventional, light and even ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime—he will be thought of as the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.” Is his apparent madness a reaction to the severities of the Augustan Muse? Can a mad poet be, as that strictest of modern critics Donald Davie suggests, “the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth”? There are such poets in other languages, notably Friedrich Hölderlin in German, though his poetry and his madness are of another order.
Smart’s originality is the product not of a candid, puzzled, anxious personality like William Cowper’s, nor the lucid, nostalgic and humane sensibility of a Goldsmith. It’s the product of a distinctly poetic imagination, using that term in a classical sense. Smart seldom composes verse: he is a poet rare in any age, most rare in the eighteenth century, a spiritual enthusiast and a consummate verbal artist. He might resemble Blake, only he has greater formal tact, a better ear, a better (that is, a less didactic) nature. His poems exist to celebrate God, not to cajole, instruct and persuade us.
The more we know about Cowper’s life, the more we appreciate his verse. With Smart the case is different. Biography obscures his achievement because it seems to apologize for it. He is regarded for his madness (so much more colorful than Cowper’s or Collins’s) at the expense of the poems. Wilfred Owen famously said, “The poetry is in the pity”; the apologist for Smart says, “The poetry is in the madness.” It is and isn’t. We readily assume that he wrote in madness, that what he wrote, in its forms and themes, partakes of his derangement. Or we divide the work into sane and “insane” and judge the parts by distinct criteria. But his madness can be seen not so much as disorder as alternative order, his religious vision not as eccentric but as direct, comprehensive. To say an artist is “mad” is to say very little. What matters is what he makes of language. Smart makes passionate poetry. Doctor Johnson gives a memorable account of Smart’s illness: “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.”
A Song to David was not, as far as we know, composed in madness. It was certainly not composed in confinement. Structurally rigid, it comes alive in its astounding prosody, not in its theological content. Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb), though produced in confinement, deserves to be read as celebration, too. Recent critics and editors who follow Smart’s own order for it claim that it is based on a clear scheme, the “antiphonal structure of Hebrew poetry,” as Davie says, the prosodic principles described by Robert Lowth: lines beginning with “Let” run parallel (ideally on a facing page) to lines beginning with “For”: responses. It gives a sense of having been extemporized, written at speed. It was in fact composed at the rate of between one and three lines a day, almost as though it was a devotional journal. Erudite and allusive, the psalmodic lines are deployed with considerable rhythmic versatility. Because Smart did not prepare the Jubilate for press, much of its obscurity and difficulty may result from the way editors have presented it, not quite understanding his intention and without his manuscript before them. There will never now be a “definitive version.” It is doubtful that Smart himself could have overseen one.
No known cause in his upbringing can be adduced as the cause of what he called the “peculiarity” of his imagination. He was writing verse at the age of four. He fell in love with a girl three times his age who used to cosset and caress him. A man pretended he would wed her; when the child told him he was too old, the man threatened to send his son in his place. Terrified at the prospect, Kit wrote eight lines to preempt his imaginary rival:
Madam, if you please
To hear such things as these.
Madam, I have a rival sad
And if you don’t take my part it will make me mad.
He says he will send his son;
But if he does I will get me a gun.
Madam if you please to pity,
O poor Kitty, O poor Kitty!
Pretty, irregular, pathetic: already in infancy insecure in love, already subject to the teasing and treachery of the adult world.
Smart was born in Shipbourne, Kent, in 1722. Peter, his father, was steward of the Vane family establishment of Fairlawn. After his father’s death when he was eleven, he spent his youth in Durham under the supervision of the Barnard branch of the Vanes. He may have experienced another frustrated passion there. He spent his holidays at the Vanes’ Raby Castle in Staindrop. They helped him to Cambridge, where he was a sizar at Pembroke College and distinguished himself as a scholar and poet. In 1745 he was elected a fellow of Pembroke. While at Cambridge he translated Pope’s “Ode for Music” (“Ode on St Cecilia’s Day”) into Latin, won Pope’s approbation, and composed tripos verses. He also wrote secular poems, amorous and otherwise. He became a friend of the organist and composer Charles Burney, from whom he learned about music; through him he got to know Johnson’s circle.
Despite his academic success, he was not an ideal student or college fellow. Overfond of drink and something of a spendthrift, in 1747 he was arrested for debts to his tailor. In 1749 he went to London to try his hand in Grub Street. He wrote ballads and fables for London periodicals. He became a competent editor. In 1752, the year of his marriage to Anna Maria Carnan, stepdaughter of his own publisher, Poems on Several Occasions was published. It included a georgic, “The Hop Garden,” a tribute to hops and to his native Kent. Between 1750 and 1755 he won the Cambridge Seatonian Prize five times for religious verse, Miltonic in manner. “On the Goodness of the Supreme Being” (1755) is the best of these, invoking “Israel’s sweet Psalmist,” David, one of Smart’s peculiar muses: “thy tuneful touch / Drove trembling Satan from the heart of Saul, / And quelled the evil Angel.” Music remained a solace to him, as to Saul. He translated Horace into prose and later turned the versions into verse. Horace was his other muse. David and Horace, an odd but, as it proved, a fruitful combination.
Between 1756 and 1763 he was confined for insanity, brought on in part by religious fervor, in part by financial improvidence (by now he had a wife and two daughters and had not learned good husbandry). Doctor Johnson and others did what they could to alleviate his difficulties. He saw the inside of St. Luke’s Hospital for the Insane and of Mr. Potter’s madhouse in Bethnal Green (in 1758 his wife retired to Dublin and his marriage was at an end). He worked hard after his release, but six years later was again imprisoned for debt. He died, aged forty-nine, in 1771 in the King’s Bench Prison. Most of his best religious poetry dates from 1759–63. The Song to David was completed and published in the year of his release from asylum. The Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, published in 1765, date from this period. Hymns for the Amusement of Children appeared in 1770.
“Pope’s ‘Messiah’ is not musical, but Smart’s ‘Song to David,’ with its pounding thematic words and the fortissimo explosion of its coda, is a musical tour de force,” says Northrop Frye. From the first stanza there’s a relentless but never monotonous regularity, syntax urging the reader on across stanza endings, creating expectation and suspense; and a taut sound organization, with strong alliteration and assonance, cunning deployment of monosyllables and polysyllables almost as though they came from different language registers, and concentrated climaxes in three-word sequences, usually expressing progression, as in the final stanza, which picks up the word “glorious” from the stanza before:
Glorious, more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down
By meekness, called thy Son;
Thou at stupendous truth believed,
And now the matchless deed’s atchieved,
DETERMINED, DARED, and DONE.
Smart returned to this form as suitably ecstatic for some of his psalm translations. Two lines of tetrameter tauten into trimeter, and the rhyme scheme is made rigorous by Smart’s preference for assonance and approximation between the rhymes. It was among the strictest forms he could choose, especially over a span of eighty-six stanzas; he proved his versatility, from the opening invocation of David and Christ to that concluding stanza. The first three stanzas—the treble construction is especially significant for him—initiate the music and establish the themes:
O Thou, that sit’st upon a throne,
With harp of high majestic tone,
To praise the King of kings;
And voice of heav’n-ascending swell,
Which, while its deeper notes excell,
Clear, as a clarion, rings:
To bless each valley, grove and coast,
And charm the cherubs to the post
Of gratitude in throngs;
To keep the days on Zion’s mount,
And send the year to his account,
With dances and with songs:
O Servant of God’s holiest charge,
The minister of praise at large,
Which thou may’st now receive;
From thy blest mansion hail and hear,
From topmost eminence appear
To this the wreath I weave.
Such verbal weaving combines with a structure of schematic rigidity. R. D. Havens pointed out in 1938 (when the slow process of dusting down the enigmatic poet began in earnest) how the stanzas are bunched in “threes, or sevens or their multiples—the mystic numbers.” Donald Davie summarizes the structure: “After three stanzas of invocation come two groups of seven describing David, then three sets of three describing David’s singing, and a further set of three describing the effects of his singing” and so on. The alternation between longer and shorter stanza runs and the syntactical and rhythmic parallelism and repetition within the “bunches” creates an aurally beguiling progression.
The power of rhythm combined with the inventive accuracy of his diction set Smart in a class of his own. Had Gray taken the poem to heart, he might have found a way out of his poetic congestion. Here, learning and artifice do what Gray wanted pseudo-primitivism to do for him. Early in his career Smart achieved uncluttered and unabstract poetic impressions, if not images; in his mature work even obscure and recondite allusions have a direct impact, not visual so much as sensual. David was master of Smart’s rhythms, both taut and expansive; Horace taught him “the curiosity of choice diction.” Marcus Walsh quotes Smart’s preface to Horace: “the beauty, force and vehemence of Impression... by which a Genius is empowered to throw an emphasis upon a word or sentence in such a wise, that it cannot escape any reader of sheer good sense, and true critical sagacity.”
Behind the language and structure of the Jubilate Agno stand the examples of the Old Testament in the King James Version, the Book of Common Prayer and, more remotely and distortedly, Milton. Smart allegorizes detail but not overall design. Each line has a various significance revealed in punning and contrived parallelisms, which Addison described as “false wit,” a wit aurally rather than analytically recognized to be right. “Let Jotham praise with the Urchin, who took up his parable and provided himself for the adversary to kick against the pricks.” It is the old adversary, the devil, whose spell is deflected by continually, musically praising creation and Creator. The rightness strikes us over long passages, cumulative, as in the famous evocation of Jeoffrey, the cat, which Benjamin Britten set to music:
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
The devil in the heart of Saul, the madness in the mind of Smart, provoke the psalms of David and the Jubilate, exorcisms, charms against chaos, celebrations of a divine force. Works of nature and art (“For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ,” “For the TRUMPET of God is a blessed intelligence and so are all the instruments of HEAVEN”) are aids against the adversary.
Smart goes where Gray could not: enthusiasm and vaticism overflow from a full if troubled spirit. He is not an imitator even in his translations, which hold the original in a form and language that make no concessions. He feels and conveys the force of the poetry he admires. His intuition is attuned to a broad tradition, not caught in the rut of convention. Marcus Walsh calls Smart’s mature style “mannered, religiose and self-conscious”—and each becomes a positive critical term, for together they produce a “homogeneous” style that “unifies”—the crucial word—“a number of divergent influences.” It is the paradoxical combination of influences, biblical and classical, and the disruptions his imagination registers, that make him outstanding and eccentric. Learning and accidents of biography deliver him from the bondage of Augustan convention into the sometimes anarchic, vertiginous freedom of Jubilate Agno and the originality of the Song to David. He has few heirs; in the context of his century his work is a symptom more than a resource. How could it be a resource when the definitive editions belong to the twentieth, not the eighteenth, century?
Beside his world, that of Oliver Goldsmith looks comfortable and consoling. “All the motion of Goldsmith’s nature,” writes Thomas De Quincey, “moved in the direction of the true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle.” He had an “unpretending mind”: a fair judgment. Versatile he certainly was; his literary activity was almost as varied—though not so copious—as Johnson’s: poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist, nature writer, essayist, correspondent. Like Johnson’s, his reputation as a poet rests on a few fine poems.
He was a remarkable Anglo-Irishman, like his friend Edmund Burke, the statesman, whose roots remained deep in Ireland, yet who flourished in England. His “Irishness” is different from Burke’s, as their milieux and destinies were to prove. But their concerns and values are similar.
Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain,
These simple blessings of the lowly train;
To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm, than all the gloss of art...
Probably in 1730, Oliver, fifth child and second son of the Reverend Charles Goldsmith, was born in County Westmeath. His father became curate of Kilkenny and moved to Lissoy, where the boy spent his childhood. He went to Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of fifteen as a sizar. Two years later his father died. The young Oliver, who did not distinguish himself academically, was publicly reprimanded for participating in a student riot. In 1750 he managed to take a degree. When he failed to get ordained, he became a tutor, perhaps toyed with the possibility of emigration to America, and at last, in 1752, settled into medical studies, supported by his family, first at Edinburgh and later at Leyden. He traveled widely in Europe, where he conceived and developed The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society (1764), the germ of The Deserted Village (1770).
In 1756 he was in London, pursuing medicine as an apothecary and as a physician in Southwark. He may have served as a proofreader in the novelist Samuel Richardson’s printing house and as an usher, or under-schoolmaster. So many jobs suggest that he prospered in none. His literary aspirations grew; journalism and translation work began to find him. He nearly sailed to India as a physician with the East India Company at Coromandel, but it was not to be. Writing began to feed him. In 1759 An Enquiry into the Present State of Learning in Europe was published. He became known as Dr. Goldsmith and numbered among friends and associates the novelist Tobias Smollett, the poets Edward Young, Edmund Burke and Doctor Johnson.
His essays, “letters”—satirical epistolary essays by imagined foreign travelers—and other writings found a market and a price. But like Smart he was impecunious. He made the acquaintance of bailiffs. A new waistcoat swallowed up the money another man might have saved for accommodation or food. Goldsmith was sociable beyond his means.
His Essays (1765) and the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) set him in the first rank among his contemporaries. But his immediate circle failed to take him seriously—much as Gay was undervalued by his friends. There is condescension in their banter, and in their criticism of his political analysis in “The Deserted Village.” Johnson said bluntly, “Goldsmith had no settled notions upon any subject; so he talked always at random. It seemed to be his intention to blurt out whatever was in his mind, to see what would become of it.” Goldsmith’s incomplete “Retaliation” (1774) is said to have been composed in response to Garrick’s extempore “Epitaph”: “Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness call’d Noll, / Who wrote like an angel, but talk’d like poor Poll.” The “Retaliation” savors a little of resentment. There is, however, nothing resentful in the tone of his plays and lighter poems, notably “The Haunch of Venison” (1770), or in the sheer unpedantic readability of his prose, which has not the gravity of Johnson’s nor the orotundity of Burke’s, but is full of the virtues of character that De Quincey admired. No wonder he commanded an audience and had a market for his prose and plays.
Of the plays, She Stoops to Conquer (1773) has proved most memorable. His themes in all his works were serious even though the tone was often light: regret for a vanishing rural order (which he idealized); impatience with the Whiggery that was replacing ideals of patrimony with the practice of investment and profit, with appalling social consequences. Goldsmith is the poet of Burke’s prose, catching the essence if not the logic of Toryism. By the time he died in 1774, he had witnessed poignantly the end of a social order almost as decisive as the earlier end that came with the execution of Charles I.
Like Gray and Collins, Goldsmith the poet was a great borrower and imitator; unlike them, his chief resource was his own prose works. There is an almost linear continuity between prose and verse, rather as in the work of Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Edward Thomas. His poems, like most in the eighteenth century, were preplanned and pursue a discursive rather than “imaginative” development. But as Donald Davie writes of The Deserted Village—and it goes for The Traveller as well—though it is “an example of poems consciously planned like essays,” it appeals “through a hidden imaginative continuity.” The poetic process functions not in the argument but in the natural imagery, presented as frail and subject to change, exploitation and destruction. “The natural,” Davie says, “which we think of as robust, is thus associated with what is vulnerable and fugitive.”
Most of Goldsmith’s surviving verse is the work of his maturity. The earliest pieces include translation and epigram, proofs of wit and formal skill, and exercises in social and literary irony. La Monnoye’s “Ménagiana” provided a model for his satirical elegies, where a fourth line in each quatrain undermines conventional sentiment with “the truth.” Typical is a stanza from “An Elegy on that Glory of her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaize”:
She strove the neighbourhood to please,
With manners wondrous winning,
And never followed wicked ways,
Unless when she was sinning.
“On the Death of the Right Honourable—” follows the same pattern. Satire is only accidentally social: its object is to ridicule a sentimental literary mode, most wittily in “On the Death of a Mad Dog.” Goldsmith could serve up poetry of the very sort he parodied, a sentimental mixture favored at the time, as in his touching romance “Edwin and Angelina.” T. S. Eliot’s judgment is fair: Goldsmith had “the old and the new in such just proportion that there is no conflict; he is Augustan and also sentimental and rural without discordance.”
“The Double Transformation: A Tale,” the first largely original poem he wrote, owes a debt to Swift, though he is more temperate than the Dean:
Jack sucked his pipe and often broke
A sigh in suffocating smoke;
While all their hours were passed between
Insulting repartee or spleen.
The moral of this tale is general, contrasting beauty and vanity, exploring what a wife owes a husband. By contrast, “The Description of an Author’s Bed-chamber” smacks of autobiography: poverty was a condition well known to the poet. Scroggen lies in his room, safe from the bailiffs under a rug:
A window patched with paper lent a ray,
That dimly showed the state in which he lay;
The sanded floor that grits beneath the tread,
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread
Evoking cold, hunger and thirst, the poem is rueful rather than angry. Scroggen’s condition is an unhappy given of his vocation. One is put in mind of Hogarth’s engraving The Distrest Poet, and the verb “grits” runs our own shoe soles across the unswept floor.
The Traveller owes something to his own prose and to Samuel Johnson, who contributed a number of lines and urged the lethargic poet to complete the work. Goldsmith drew on Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Loix in formulating the ideas: the poem was patiently conceived and exhaustively revised. He drafted it first with wide gaps between the lines, filling them with deliberations and deletions. He exploited the popular topographical genre: the physical suggests a moral panorama; natural detail acquires moral weight as in Gray’s Eton poem, but on a grand scale. It proceeds from Italy through Switzerland, France and Holland, to Britain. It started in a letter Goldsmith wrote to his brother, and perhaps for this reason there is a frank directness of address in its couplets, which have little of the stiff formality of Johnson’s or the decorousness of Pope’s. The argument often stretches across couplets: they are not emphatically end-stopped and can hardly be called “heroic.” Intellectual expansiveness loosens the form and reflects an imagination concerned more with the process of thought than with ripe, polished conclusions.
He judges the virtues and faults of each nation he surveys. It is striking how he evokes nations, their cultures and temperaments, through landscape, insisting on a continuity between man and environment. Lord Macaulay thought this work the noblest and most simply planned philosophical poem in the language. There is novelty in the way he introduces, as Roger Lonsdale shows, his own “predicament and sensibility as matters of interest and importance” at the beginning and end. Here (and more so in “The Deserted Village”) Goldsmith repeats words, not as Pope does locally for special emphasis, but throughout the poem—words that are pivots of thought and mood, whose reiteration adds to the meditative tone. We have arrived at the very frontier of Romanticism.
But we are not ready to cross over. In the epistle dedicatory to his brother, Goldsmith attacks blank verse, Pindaric odes and metrical experiments. “Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it, and he is generally much in the wrong, so he has always much to say; for error is ever talkative.” He promises wholesome formal conservatism. Worse than poetic is political partisanship: “Party entirely distorts the judgment and destroys the taste. When the mind is once affected with this disease, it can only find pleasure in what contributes to increase the distemper.” For himself, “Without espousing the cause of any party, I have attempted to moderate the rage of all.” Goldsmith is a moderator, but not a pragmatist. He has his own orientation. “At gold’s superior charm all freedom flies, / The needy sell it and the rich man buys.” His praise of liberty puts Thomson to shame. In The Traveller he rails against party:
O then how blind to all that truth requires,
Who think it freedom when a part aspires!
Calm is my soul nor apt to rise in arms,
Except when fast approaching danger warms:
But when contending chiefs blockade the throne,
Contracting regal power to stretch their own;
When I behold a fractious band agree
To call it freedom, when themselves are free;
Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw,
Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law;
The wealth of climes, where savage nations roam,
Pillaged from slaves to purchase slaves at home;
Fear, pity, justice, indignation start,
Tear off reserve and bare my swelling heart;
Till half a patriot, half a coward grown,
I fly from petty tyrants to the throne.
He laments rural depopulation, enclosure, the decay of the countryside. Thus the Industrial Revolution was recorded in poetry not in itself, but in its effect on the principles of permanence. Few poets experienced the industrial cities. They witnessed change almost entirely in terms of its impact on rural England. Cowper, Crabbe, even Hardy, observe the decay of the established order, but perceive the new order and its vicissitudes only from a distance.
The Deserted Village focuses initially on one “place,” Auburn, which Goldsmith idealizes and generalizes: it comes to represent all such communities. The poem, drafted in prose, was then corseted into couplets, which disciplined and condensed expression, but always with reference to an initial design. The idealization of Auburn, possibly the Lissoy of his childhood, is not excessive. If it is sentimental, it is not falsely so; it serves as the ground against which he develops his meditation, without the argument of The Traveller. Place and thought give way to elegiac feeling, a sense (not just an idea) of irrevocable loss: organic, traditional communities sacrificed to the inconstant will of commerce, enclosure, exploitation. For him this represents a loss of personal roots, yet his lament is comprehensive because his is by extension a general experience.The blisses of village life—“charm” and “sweet” recur too frequently in his evocation—are so pervasive as to be almost abstract. The general judgment is appealingly simple and just:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
Times “When every rood of ground maintained its man” are over. Trade is the undiscriminating instrument of change. In the past, the peasant crowned “A youth of labour with an age of ease.” The lines about the man who “Bends to the grave with unperceived decay, / While resignation gently slopes the way” are often cited for the appositeness of their verbs, the exact fit of language with image and moral content. Such usage gives the lie to those who say Goldsmith has an “essentially prosaic” imagination. He is the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, admittedly—the vicar himself is invoked in lines 133–92. But the imaginative procedures of poet and novelist are distinct, even if the poem took off from a prose draft. The verb “slope” is a measure of the poet.
Satire is too weak a word for Goldsmith’s passionate sorrow at the effects of the deeds of those who would replace modest happiness with egotistical splendor, displace the organic and vital with the formal, monumental and ornamental (“The country blooms—a garden and a grave”). They compel common men—their countrymen—to leave their native soil and emigrate to unknown lands; the humble have no redress against the power of wealth. Johnson contributed the poem’s final quatrain. We are moved by the poem; but we are resigned, for the poet seems to know that what he elegizes is gone beyond recall, that Whiggery is the order of the day. As in the early poem about the poet’s threadbare room, this poem does not resist: it accepts what is. This is the source of its aesthetic wholeness (it is not “instrumental,” it does not advocate change) and its political inadequacy.