Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  The patron is always changing, and for the most part imperceptibly. But one such change in the middle of the eighteenth century took place in the full light of day, and has been recorded for us with his usual vivacity by Oliver Goldsmith, who was himself one of its victims: —

  When the great Somers was at the helm [he wrote] patronage was fashionable among our nobility.... I have heard an old poet of that glorious age say, that a dinner with his lordship had procured him invitations for the whole week following; that an airing in his patron’s chariot has supplied him with a citizen’s coach on every future occasion....

  But this link [he continues] now seems entirely broken. Since the days of a certain prime minister of inglorious memory, the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. A jockey or a laced player, supplies the place of the scholar, poet, or man of virtue.... He is called an author, and all know that an author is a thing only to be laughed at. His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company. At his approach the most fat unthinking face brightens into malicious meaning. Even aldermen laugh, and revenge on him the ridicule which was lavished on their forefathers....

  To be laughed at by aldermen instead of riding in the chariots of statesmen was a change clearly not to the liking of a writer in whom we seem to perceive a spirit sensitive to ridicule and susceptible to the seduction of bloom-coloured velvet.

  But the evils of the change went deeper. In the old days, he said, the patron was a man of taste and breeding, who could be trusted to see “that all who deserved fame were in a capacity of attaining it”. Now in the mid-eighteenth century young men of brains were thrown to the mercy of the booksellers. Penny-a-lining came into fashion. Men of originality and spirit became docile drudges, voluminous hacks. They stuffed out their pages with platitudes. They “write through volumes while they do not think through a page”. Solemnity and pomposity became the rule. “On my conscience I believe we have all forgot to laugh in these days.” The new public fed greedily upon vast hunks of knowledge. They demanded huge encyclopaedias, soulless compilations, which were “carried on by different writers, cemented into one body, and concurring in the same design by the mediation of the booksellers”. All this was much to the disgust of a man who wrote clearly, shortly and outspokenly by nature; who held that “Were angels to write books, they never would write folios”; who felt himself among the angels but knew that the age of the angels was over. The chariots and the earls had winged their way back to Heaven; in their place stood a stout tradesman demanding so many lines of prose to be delivered by Saturday night without fail or the wretched hack would go without dinner on Sunday.

  Goldsmith did his share of the work manfully, as a glance at the list of his works shows. But he was to find that the change from the Earl to the bookseller was not without its advantages. A new public had come into existence with new demands. Everybody was turning reader. The writer, if he had ceased to dine with the nobility, had become the friend and instructor of a vast congregation of ordinary men and women. They demanded essays as well as encyclopaedias. They allowed their writers a freedom which the old aristocracy had never permitted. As Goldsmith said, the writer could now “refuse invitations to dinner”; he “could wear just such clothes as men generally wear” and “he can bravely assert the dignity of independence”. Goldsmith by temper and training was peculiarly fitted to take advantage of the new state of things. He was a man of lively intelligence and outspoken good sense. He had the born writer’s gift of being in touch with the thing itself and not with the outer husks of words. There was something shrewd and objective in his temper which fitted him admirably to preach little sermons and wing little satires. If he had little education and no learning, he had a large and varied stock of experience to draw on. He had knocked about the world. He had seen Leyden and Paris and Padua as a foot traveller sees famous cities. But his travels, far from plunging him into reverie or giving him a passion for the solitudes and sublimities of nature, had served to make him relish human society better and had proved how slight are the differences between man and man. He preferred to call himself a Citizen of the World rather than an Englishman. “We are now become so much Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards or Germans that we are no longer... members of that grand society which comprehends the whole of human kind.” He insisted that we should pool our discoveries and learn from each other.

  It is this detached attitude and width of view that give Goldsmith his peculiar flavour as an essayist. Other writers pack their pages fuller and bring us into closer touch with themselves. Goldsmith, on the other hand, keeps just on the edge of the crowd so that we can hear what the common people are saying and note their humours. That is why his essays, even the early ones, in The Bee, make such good reading. That is why it is just and fitting that The Bee and The Citizen of the World should be reprinted again to-day, at a very modest price; and why Mr. Church should once more draw our attention in an excellent introduction to the unfaded merits of a book printed so long ago as 1762. The Citizen is still a most vivacious companion as he takes his walk from Charing Cross to Ludgate Hill. The streets are lit up for the Battle of Minden, and he pokes fun at the parochial patriotism of the English. He hears the shoemaker scolding his wife and forboding what will become of shoemakers “if Mounseers in wooden shoes come among us... when perhaps Madam Pompadour herself might have shoes scopped out of an old pear tree”; he hears the waiter at Ashley’s punch house boasting to the company how if he were Secretary of State he would take Paris and plant the English standard on the Bastille. He peeps into St. Paul’s and marvels at the curious lack of reverence shown by the English at their worship. He reflects that rags “which might be valued at half a string of copper money in China” yet needed a fleet and an army to win them. He marvels that the French and English are at war simply because people like their muffs edged with fur and must therefore kill each other and seize a country belonging to people who were in possession from time immemorial”. Shrewdly and sarcastically he casts his eye, as he saunters on, upon the odd habits and sights that the English are so used to that they no longer see them. Indeed he could scarcely have chosen a method better calculated to make the new public aware of itself or one better suited to the nature of his own genius. If Goldsmith stood still he could be as flat, though not as solemn, as any of the folio makers who were his aversion. Here, however, he must keep moving; he must pass rapidly under review all kinds of men and customs and speak his mind on them. And here his novelist’s gift stood him in good stead. If he thinks he thinks in the round. An idea at once dresses itself up in flesh and blood and becomes a human being. Beau Tibbs comes to life: Vauxhall Gardens is bustling with people: the writer’s garret is before us with its broken windows and the spider’s web in the corner. He has a perpetual instinct to make concrete, to bring into being.

  Perhaps it was the novelist’s gift that made him a little impatient with essay writing. The shortness of the essay made people think it superficial. “I could have made them more metaphysical had I thought fit,” he replied. But it is doubtful if he was prevented by circumstances from any depth of speculation. The real trouble was that Beau Tibbs and Vauxhall Gardens asked to be given a longer lease of life, but the end of the column was reached; down came the shears, and a new subject must be broached next week. The natural outlet, as Goldsmith found, was the novel. In those freer pages he had room to give his characters space to walk round and display themselves. Yet The Vicar of Wakefield keeps some of the characteristics that distinguish the more static art of the essayist. The characters are not quite free to go their own ways; they must come back at the tug of the string to illustrate the moral. This necessity is the stranger to us because good and bad are no longer so positively white and black; the art of the moralist is out of fashion in fiction. But Goldsmith not only believed in blackness and whiteness: he believed — perhaps one belief depends upon the other — that goodness will be rewarded, and vice punished. It is a doctrine, it may strike us when we re
ad The Vicar of Wakefield, which imposes some restrictions on the novelist. There is no need of the mixed, of the twisted, of the profound. Lightly tinted, broadly shaded with here a foible, there a peccadillo, the characters of the Primroses are like those tropical fish who seem to have only backbones but no other organs to darken the transparency of their flesh. Our sympathies are not put upon the rack. Daughters may be seduced, houses burnt, and good men sent to prison, yet since the world is a perfectly balanced place, let it lurch as it likes, it is bound to settle into equilibrium in the long run. The most hardened of sinners — here Goldsmith stops characteristically to point out the evils of the prison system — will take to cutting tobacco stoppers if given the chance and thus enter the straight path of virtue again. Such assumptions stopped certain avenues of thought and imagination. But the limitation had its advantages; he could give all his mind to the story. All is clear, related, and uncrowded. He knew precisely what to leave out. Thus, once we begin to read we read on, not to reach the end, but to enjoy the present moment. We cannot dismember this small complete world. It hems us in, it surrounds us. We ask nothing better than to sit in the sun on the hawthorn bank and sing “Barbara Allen”, or Johnny Armstrong’s last good night. Shades of violence and wrong can scarcely trespass here. But the scene is saved from insipidity by Goldsmith’s tart eighteenth-century humour. One advantage of having a settled code of morals is that you know exactly what to laugh at.

  Yet there are passages in the Vicar which give us pause. “Fudge! fudge! fudge!” Burchell exclaims, and it seems that, in order to get the full effect of the scene, we should see it in the flesh. There is no margin of suggestion in this clear prose; it creates no populous and teeming silence which would be broken by the physical presence of the actors. Indeed, when we turn from Goldsmith’s novel to Goldsmith’s plays his characters seem to gain vigour and identity by standing before us in the round. They can say everything they have to say without the intervention of the novelist. This may be taken, if we choose, as proof that they have nothing of extreme subtlety to say. Yet Goldsmith did himself a wrong when he followed the old habit of labelling his people with names — Croker, Lofty, Richlands — which seem to allow them but one quality apiece. His observation, trained in the finer discriminations of fiction, worked much more cunningly than the names suggest. Bodies and hearts are attached to these signboard faces; wit of the true spontaneous sort bubbles from their lips. He stood, of course, at the very point where comedy can flourish, as remote from the tragic violence of the Elizabethans as from the minute maze of modern psychology. The “humours” of the Elizabethan stage had fined themselves into characters. Convention and conviction and an unquestioned standard of values seem to support the large, airy world of his invention. Nothing could be more amusing than She Stoops to Conquer — one might even go so far as to say that amusement of so pure a quality will never come our way again. It demands too rare a combination of conditions. Nothing is too far fetched or fantastical to dry up the life blood in the characters themselves; we taste the double pleasure of a comic situation in which living people are the actors. It may be true that the amusement is not of the highest order. We have not gained a deeper understanding of human oddity and frailty when we have laughed to tears over the predicament of a good lady who has been driven round her house for two hours in the darkness. To mistake a private house for an inn is not a disaster that reveals the hidden depths or the highest dignity of human nature. But these are questions that fade out in the enjoyment of reading — an enjoyment which is much more composite than the simple word amusement can cover. When a thing is perfect of its kind we cannot stop, under that spell, to pick our flower to pieces. There is a unity about it which forbids us to dismember it.

  Yet even so, in the midst of this harmony and completeness we hear now and again another note. “But they are dead, and their sorrows are over.”

  “Life at its greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.”

  “No sounds were heard but of the shrilling cock, and the deep-mouthed watch-dog at hollow distance.” A poet seems hidden on the other side of the page anxious to concentrate its good-humoured urbanity into a phrase or two of deeper meaning. And Goldsmith was a true poet, even though he could not afford to entertain the muse for long. “And thou, sweet Poetry,” he exclaimed,

  My shame in crowds, my solitary pride,

  Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe,

  That found’st me poor at first, and keep’st me so;

  — that “dear charming nymph” fluttered her wings about him even if she made no very long stay. It is poetry of course at one remove from prose: poetry using only the greys and browns upon her palette: poetry clicking her heels together at the end of the line as though executing the steps of a courtly dance: poetry with such a sediment of good sense that it naturally crystallizes itself into epigram: —

  And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;

  or: —

  How small of all that human hearts endure

  That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

  The argument of his poems has already been stated in prose. Kingdoms grow to an unwieldy size; empires spread ruin round them; nothing is more to be valued than “a happy human face”; power and independence are to be dreaded. It has all been said before; but here the village is Auburn; the land is Ireland; all is made concrete and visualized, given a voice and a name. The world of Goldsmith’s poetry is, of course, a flat and eyeless world; swains sport with nymphs, and the deep is finny. But pathos is the more moving in the midst of reserve, and the poet’s sudden emotion tells the more when it is obviously not good manners to talk about oneself. If it is objected that Goldsmith’s imagination is too narrowly and purely domestic, that he ignores all the rubs and struggles of life to dwell upon

  ... the gentler morals, such as play.

  Through life’s more cultured walks, and charm the way,

  it is also undeniable that what he loves is not an artificial and foppish refinement. “Those calm desires that ask’d but little room” are the pith of life, the essence that he has pressed out from the turbulent and unsatisfying mass.

  Yet Goldsmith has a peculiar reticence which forbids us to dwell with him in complete intimacy. It is partly no doubt that he has no such depths to reveal as some of our essayists — the solitudes and sublimities are not for him, rather the graces and amenities. And also we are kept at arm’s length by the urbanity of his style, just as good manners confer impersonality upon the well-bred. But there may be another reason for his reserve. Lamb, Hazlitt, Montaigne talk openly about themselves because their faults are not small ones; Goldsmith was reserved because his foibles are the kind that men conceal. Nobody at least can read Goldsmith in the mass without noticing how frequently, yet how indirectly, certain themes recur — dress, ugliness, awkwardness, poverty and the fear of ridicule. It is as if the genial man were haunted by some private dread, as if he were conscious that besides the angel there lived in him a less reputable companion, resembling perhaps Poor Poll. It is only necessary to open Boswell to make sure. There, at once, we see our serene and mellifluous writer in the flesh. “His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman.” With touch upon touch the unprepossessing portrait is built up. We are shown Goldsmith writhing upon the sofa in an agony of jealousy: Goldsmith thrusting himself into the talk and floundering on “without knowing how to get off”: Goldsmith full of vanities and jealousies: Goldsmith dressing up his ugly pockmarked body in a smart bloom-coloured coat. The portrait is painted without sympathy save, indeed, of that inverted kind which comes from knowing from your own experience the sufferings which you describe. Boswell, too, was jealous, and seized upon his sitter’s foibles with the malicious insight of a rival.

  Yet, like all Boswell’s portraits, it has the breath of life in i
t. He brings the other Goldsmith to the surface — he combines them both. He proves that the silver-tongued writer was no simple soul, gently floating through life from the honeysuckle to the hawthorn hedge. On the contrary, he was a complex man, a man full of troubles, without “settled principle”; who lived from hand to mouth and from day to day; who wrote his loveliest sentences in a garret under pressure of poverty. And yet, so oddly are human faculties combined, he had only to take his pen and he was revenged upon Boswell, upon the fine gentleman who sneered at him, upon his own ugly body and stumbling tongue. He had only to write and all was clear and melodious; he had only to write and he was among the angels, speaking with a silver tongue in a world where all is ordered, rational, and serene.

  White’s Selborne

  “... there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some certainty.” Gilbert White is talking, of course, about birds; the good ornithologist, he says, should be able to distinguish them by their air— “on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand.” But when the bird happens to be Gilbert White himself, when we try to discriminate the colour and shape of this very rare fowl, we are at a loss. Is he, like the bird so brightly coloured by hand as a frontispiece to the second volume, a hybrid — something between a hen that clucks and a nightingale that sings? It is one of those ambiguous books that seem to tell a plain story, the Natural History of Selborne, and yet by some apparently unconscious device of the author’s has a door left open, through which we hear distant sounds, a dog barking, cart wheels creaking, and see, when “all the fading landscape sinks in night”, if not Venus herself, at least a phantom owl.