SOURCE: "The Vicar of Wakefield and Other Prose Writings: A Reconsideration" in The Art of Oliver Goldsmith, edited by Andrew Swarbrick, Vision Press, 1984, pp. 17-32.

In the reassessment of authors that has taken place during the last half century, a process that has enhanced so many reputations, Goldsmith is not among those who have benefited, and the reason is not difficult to discover. His gifts were of the lighter kind. The aspects of eighteenth-century literature that he represents are akin to those associated with Addison, another Augustan who has not gained ground. Both writers had ease, grace, a pleasant humour. The present age attaches more importance to the deeper and weightier qualities of Samuel Johnson, whose work was scandalously underrated by critics in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, the supreme greatness of his finest prose going virtually unrecognized by generations of literary scholars and presumably of readers. That Johnson should now be receiving some of the praise so long withheld is very much as it should be, and it is not a matter for serious complaint if lighter talents should have suffered a degree of eclipse. But Goldsmith was greatly admired in Johnson's circle and he has been a much loved author for too long to be excluded from the kind of serious critical attention that others have received. Lightness is not the only issue. Sterne might be described as light by Johnsonian standards: Johnson himself could have put it more crushingly, but Sterne's reputation has enjoyed enormous enhancement in recent decades. There is something elusive about the nature of Goldsmith's achievement, and about the merits of The Vicar of Wakefield, with which we shall be mainly concerned.

His characteristic qualities, of mind and style, probably need to be seen as limitations before their positive aspects can be appreciated, and a brief glance at some minor works may be of use here. In The Vicar of Wakefield he found a medium in which the limitations do not count as such. They become virtues because the effect lies so much in what is not attempted as well as in what is. A limited writer with artistic tact and a sense of the felicitous cannot only produce a masterpiece; he can throw light on the character of other masterpieces which attempt bigger things. The Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759) is his earliest work of any importance, and while it provides some examples of his merits as a prose writer it also reveals characteristic weaknesses. The first impression it gives, as the question of cultural decline is broached in the opening pages, is of neatness and ease: 'The publick has been often excited by a false alarm, so that at present the nearer we approach the threatned period of decay, the more our fatal security increases' (I, 257).¹ His habit generally is to introduce topics with pleasantly turned phrases. His enterprise here involves the reduction of an enormously large area of material to a small compass; the course of ancient and modern learning, with reference in the modern period to several countries, is surveyed in about eighty pages. Goldsmith's light touch could have been entirely effective had it been combined with another quality: authority, evidence of solid knowledge, however little detail was to be used. The brief essay on the big subject can be an impressive literary vehicle, and of this there is no better example than Johnson's 'Introduction to the Political State of Great Britain', published three years before in the Literary Magazine: a masterly account of two centuries of history in about twenty pages, clear in outline, cool in manner, though with a few strokes of overwhelming moral condemnation of his country's policies. Goldsmith has no such strength. The prevailing attitude in the early chapters of the essay is of a facile Augustanism, an often embarrassing air of confidence in the value of a 'politeness' that can dismiss whole ages of bookishness and scholarly effort. 'Libraries were crammed, but not enriched with … works [which] effectually encreased our application, by professing to remove it.' '… if Terence could not raise [the reader] to a smile, Evantius was at hand, with a long-winded scholium to encrease his titillation' (I, 265, 266). Of the philosopher in the time of Lucian he says that 'he was chiefly remarkable for his avarice, his impudence, and his beard' (I, 268), one of several sallies that do no more for urbanity than for learning. He makes too frequent use of phrases like 'specious triflers' and 'speculative idlers'. The passage about men who 'carried on a petty traffic in some little creek … but never ventured out into the great ocean of knowlege' (I, 268) fails of its effect because Goldsmith himself gives so little evidence of important experience of the great writers or great issues of those ages. Occasionally there is a critical comment that makes eighteenth-century taste look absurdly provincial: '[Dante] addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehensions; united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Peter and Virgil … and shews a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity' (I, 274). But one passage at least may be quoted in which Augustan elegance and agility in phrasing are wedded to acute social observation. He is commenting on the conditions of authorship in France and England:

The French nobility have certainly a most pleasing way of satisfying the vanity of an author, without indulging his avarice. A man of literary merit, is sure of being caressed by the Great, though seldom enriched. His pension from the crown just supplies half a competence, and the sale of his labours, makes some small addition to his circumstances; thus the author leads a life of splendid poverty, and seldom becomes wealthy or indolent enough, to discontinue an exertion of those abilities, by which he rose. With the English, it is different; our writers of rising merit are generally neglected; while the few of an established reputation, are over paid by a luxurious affluence. The first encounter every hardship which generally attends upon aspiring indigence; the latter, enjoy the vulgar, and, perhaps, the more prudent satisfaction of putting riches in competition with fame. Those are often seen to spend their youth in want and obscurity; these are sometimes found to lead an old age of indolence and avarice. (1, 298-99)

He is at his best in places where his subject can be treated largely as one of social manners. Another example may be found in his rather refreshing comments on the poetic taste of the time. He objects to the current vogue of blank verse, and in general to a 'disgusting solemnity' in poetry. In both verse and prose he prefers the 'agreeable trifling which … often deceives us into instruction' (I, 319). In keeping with all this is his review of Gray's Odes (1757), where he laments that 'talents so capable of giving pleasure to all'—presumably in the Elegy—are 'exerted in efforts that, at best, can amuse only the few' (I, 112). In general he shows a preference for the literature of the early part of the century, which addressed itself to society and cultivated the virtue of ease, avoiding what he saw as heaviness and pedantry. But on the subject of blank verse one would have liked to know whether he responded to Thomson at his best. With no discussion of examples his comments here, as in most of the Enquiry, are somewhat superficial.

His limitations as well as his strengths are evident in his short biographical studies. Characteristically he begins his life of Bolingbroke on a promising note:

There are some characters that seem formed by nature to take delight in struggling with opposition, and whose most agreeable hours are passed in storms of their own creating. The subject of the present sketch was perhaps of all others the most indefatigable in raising himself enemies, to shew his power in subduing them; and was not less employed in improving his superior talents, than in finding objects on which to exercise their activity. (111, 437)

A 'sketch' of these aspects of Bolingbroke would have been very acceptable; but as Friedman has shown, 'fully four-fifths' of the life were borrowed from the Biographia Britannica, and this was not material for the animated and personal account which the reader has been led to expect. Perhaps Goldsmith should not be judged on such obvious hackwork, but the discrepancy here gives an impression of irresponsibility. His life of Richard Nash is a different matter, and Donald A. Stauffer couples it with Johnson's life of Savage as an example of biography that aims at a close study of the human truth with an attempt to weigh moral strengths and weaknesses. Quoting the preface in which he claims to have described 'the man as he was …, a weak man, governing weaker subjects', Stauffer writes that Goldsmith 'deserves the praise accorded to a pioneer'.² The formidable comparison with Johnson, which inevitably haunts the study of Goldsmith, was suggested by a contemporary writer in the Monthly Review: 'A trivial subject, treated for the most part in a lively, ingenious, and entertaining manner. Mr. Samuel Johnson's admirable Life of Savage seems to have been chosen as the model of this performance' (quoted by Friedman, III, 282-83). The contrast between the two could hardly be steeper. Johnson's theme is tragedy and inordinate failure, relieved by flashes of goodness, with scenes of an underworld of desolation which he himself had experienced. As an exercise of moral realism, magnanimity and compassion, it stands by itself. Goldsmith took as his subject a man whose career is a monument to values or vanities that belong to society at its most artificial. The choice, if it was made with Johnson's work in mind, might almost be an act of self-recognition, showing Goldsmith's awareness of his fitness for surfaces rather than depths. But it shows also his gift, not exhibited everywhere, for cultivating with fine judgement the possibilities of a limited theme. Limited it is, but Nash touched many lives and attracted notice in a great variety of ways; so what might be called his experiment at Bath had consequences which, to a modern reader, is of very considerable sociological and documentary significance. It was a happy instinct that caused Goldsmith to illustrate his biography with such a wealth of anecdotes, letters, public notices and, finally, obituary compositions, items which in other biographies of this time a reader might be tempted to pass over. We can be grateful that a writer of Goldsmith's quality saw it as a task worth performing, and that he made so much of it. An element of paradox is present from the outset in his reference to 'the pains he took in pursuing pleasure, and the solemnity he assumed in adjusting trifles' (III, 288), and in the early part of the life the emphasis is on the more trivial part of his character. After his first successes at Bath, the level of praise is modest: 'But to talk more simply, when we talk at best of trifles. None could possibly conceive a person more fit to fill this employment than Nash' (III, 301), and here the reference is to his easy manner with fashionable people and his general vivacity. But gradually the evidence accumulates of his practical ability, the initiative that led to the improvement of accommodation and amenities, and the laws governing behaviour which he put up in the Pump-room. Two of these, one concerning manners, the other morals, may be quoted: '³. That gentlemen of fashion never appearing in a morning before the ladies in gowns and caps, shew breeding and respect… 10. That all whisperers of lies and scandal, be taken for their authors' (III, 303). There were strict hours at which dancing should begin and end, rules relating to the orderly departure of ladies, and he conducted skilful propaganda against the wearing of boots in the rooms. He also introduced measures to prevent duels. In all this, and in many other matters, Nash grows in our estimation as a genuine reformer, shaping the community in accordance with new styles of living, and making his contribution to the development of outlook that we associate with the names of Addison and Steele, though he fell so far short of them in seriousness. As the ups and downs of his character are traced, his lavish generosity along with his vanity and irresponsibility, his substantial share in the establishing of a hospital juxtaposed with his more whimsical acts of charity, his genuine efforts to protect female virtue and save gamesters from ruin against a background of his own wasteful folly and habitual ostentation, we may admire Goldsmith's control of the effect. Extreme old age, relative poverty, failure to change his ways when nature and fortune no longer supplied the means: with these sobering themes the record concludes. On its own level it is as balanced a study as the life of Savage, though of course it lacks the momentous heights and depths and the sombre eloquence.

Goldsmith's style is ideal for the depiction of Bath's social life. Writing of the primitive pleasures of this and other resorts he describes them as

merely rural, the company splenetic, rustic, and vulgar.… People of fashion … usually spent that season amidst a solitude of country squires, parsons wives, and visiting tenants.… To a person, who does not thus calmly trace things to their source, nothing will appear more strange, than how the healthy could ever consent to follow the sick to those places of spleen, and live with those, whose disorders are ever apt to excite a gloom in the spectator. The truth is, the gaming table was properly the salutary font, to which such numbers flocked. (111, 299)

'A solitude of country squires', 'the salutary font' are characteristic turns of phrase. The passages where Nash's character is summed up are full of well-shaped formulations; for example:

He was naturally endued with good sense; but by having been long accustomed to pursue trifles, his mind shrunk to the size of the little objects on which it was employed. His generosity was boundless, because his tenderness and his vanity were in equal proportion; the one impelling him to relieve misery, and the other to make his benefactions known. (111, 378)

What we learn from these works provides some approach to the question of where Goldsmith's gifts lie, and is relevant to our discussion of The Vicar of Wakefield; but the latter contains another element. It is a specifically Christian work, it exhibits values and beliefs the treatment of which must raise questions concerning the author's own central attitude to life. Goldsmith seems to have been a man of slender human capacity, and we can welcome the adjustment of his art whereby he succeeded in conveying these convictions without falsity. He chose a form which, as it were, reduces them to an appropriate scale. But there can be no doubt that he intends us to take them seriously. 'The hero of this piece', he writes in his Advertisement, 'unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family.' He dissociates himself from those who 'have been taught to deride religion', and who will therefore 'laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity'.

In an essay published over thirty years ago I discussed the process whereby the emotional effect of the calamities suffered by the vicar is reduced.' The episode of Olivia's abduction was described as 'between the serious and the comic', the account of the fire 'full of words which ought to suggest emotional intensity … but quite without emotiveness', the events having all the marks of 'story-book contrivance'. Some components—the autobiographical digressions, for example—were categorized as miniature versions of familiar traditions, while the narrative as a whole was a much modified and attenuated Book of Job. This view still seems to me to be valid in many respects, but my statement of it was over-simplified and I now welcome the opportunity to reconsider it. The passage in which the vicar, who has endured so much pain and affliction but has succeeded in winning the support of his fellow-prisoners, preaches an eloquent sermon to them, now seems to me moving and beautiful. The refined Augustan idiom of the sermon, so unsuitable to the occasion if we imagine the scene realistically, is both elevated and discreet. The use of this convention in the eighteenth century could be regarded as a distancing of religion in the interests of good manners, but Johnson could use this kind of language with breath-taking effect, and Goldsmith's sermon, if rather lightweight compared with the great Ramblers, has genuine purity of feeling. No harm results from the fact that in some of the phrases ('To fly through regions unconfined as air, to bask in the sunshine of eternal bliss, to carroll over endless hymns of praise …') the vicar loses himself a little in his dreams (such standardized dreams too) of heavenly happiness. There is room for some amusement, but as an Augustan set-piece the episode has nobility.

All students of The Vicar of Wakefield should be aware of Robert H. Hopkins's lengthy discussion of the book and its critics.⁴ Hopkins argues that the author's intention is satirical at the expense of the vicar, and this view, although I disagree with it, may be regarded as a helpful background against which to develop an alternative one. My belief is that Goldsmith offers us the vicar in the same spirit of commendation as the Advertisement would suggest, and that the modifying elements in the portrait which a satirical theory would make use of are not in fact to be interpreted so negatively. The style of character portrayal has kinship with conventions we are familiar with in earlier writers. They are more boldly exploited by Fielding, whose techniques are relevant here. Parson Adams on most occasions uses the challenging and dignified idiom of a man of God to which he is abundantly entitled, though his misjudgement of circumstances often renders his performances comic; but in Chapter 8 of the second book something very surprising happens. It is as if he had been caught with his cassock off. In his very plebeian tale concerning the more mundane side of his existence, his style changes: it rambles, he has become ordinary. Of Sir Thomas he says: 'I have always found his kitchen, and his cellar too, open to me: many a time, after service … have I recruited my spirits with a glass of his ale.' And later he speaks of the occasions, 'such as the approach of an election', when he has thrown 'a dash or two' into his sermons, for which Sir Thomas has been grateful. We have no reason to conclude that he has done anything very base, and this remarkable chapter does Adams no harm. But we are reminded that there may be a commonplace side to gospel Christians, and that a poor parson's life had exigencies, which is not surprising. What is more relevant here is that eighteenth-century characters in the comic tradition are creations of artifice and rhetoric, sometimes shifting from one idiom to another, revealing not only a different side of character but also a change of persona. Goldsmith's method is not the same as Fielding's, but the vicar must be seen in terms of the style with which he is endowed as narrator, and this style has a generally formalizing effect. We may begin with an example that raises only very mildly the controversial issues relating to the suggestion of satirical intention. In Chapter VI, after an evening of simple entertainment (with gooseberry wine and old songs), the vicar's family realize that it is too late to send their guest Mr. Burchell to an ale-house; so the younger children vie with each other in offering a share of their beds:

'Well done, my good children,' cried 1, 'hospitality is one of the first Christian duties. The beast retires to its shelter, and the bird flies to its nest; but helpless man can only find refuge from his fellow creature. The greatest stranger in this world, was he that came to save it. He never had an house, as if willing to see what hospitality was left remaining amongst us. Deborah, my dear,' cried 1, to my wife, 'give those boys a lump of sugar each, and let Dick's be the largest, because he spoke first.'

Gooseberry wine and lumps of sugar belong to the same level, but it is the mark of Goldsmith's style that the Christian eloquence can be so easily accommodated. The amiable mood of the episode forestalls any suggestion that the vicar is too ready with his moral lesson or that the humble system of rewards is a ridiculous anti-climax. The amiability operates through the style. It is a matter of easy assimilation of one kind of discourse to another.

The easy manner in which the vicar can refer to his more peculiar eccentricities expresses sublime unawareness, and in some kinds of literature such a style could be used satirically; but the easy manner is also Goldsmith's and it invites us to be amused rather than critical. One of the vicar's most egregious peculiarities is his obsession with strict monogamy, which causes him to compose an epitaph for his 'only' wife

… in which I extolled her prudence, ceconomy, and obedience till death; and having got it copied fair, with an elegant frame, it was placed over the chimney-piece, where it answered several very useful purposes. It admonished my wife of her duty to me, and my fidelity to her; it inspired her with a passion for fame, and constantly put her in mind of her end. (Ch. II)

We enjoy the neatness of Goldsmith's wit too much to complain of the perverse neatness of the vicar's logic. We do not accept the vicar at his own valuation, obviously; but we accept him, and this means that we accept Goldsmith and the tone of the narration generally. It might be said that both the vicar and his creator appeal to and are in need of our good humour, though for different reasons. The reader soon realizes that acceptance of Goldsmith as a novelist entails tolerance of many devices (such as the rôle of Mr. Burchell) which are inept by normal standards. But in the Advertisement he pleaded that 'a book may be amusing with numerous errors', and readers have found part of their amusement in the exercise of the tolerance he solicits. Goldsmith's tone is such as to induce tolerance of the many episodes in this story of contemporary life which are reduced to a fairy tale primitiveness.

One of the characteristics of this kind of artifice in eighteenth-century fiction is that it does not invite us to translate it into 'reality'. When Joseph Andrews writes very much in the style of a servant to his sister, a fellow servant, and in a later chapter cries out in the exalted rhetoric of the romances in his sickroom delirium, we are not invited to ask questions about his actual range of verbal expression. There is no actuality. But we can trust Fielding to keep his novels so alive that such specifications are unnecessary. A character can be created by these comic means and yet give a sufficient impression of human solidity. A similar principle holds good for the vicar. Such questions as 'How naive is the vicar?' are not invited.⁵ The story demands that in some matters he should appear to be totally lacking in powers of observation and reflection, but partly because it is a necessity required by the story (just as Elizabethan dramatic plots may require special credulity in the characters who are to be deceived) we are never in a position to say quite what sort of person he 'really' is. It is not the intention of this kind of fiction that we should ask such questions.

Sometimes the play between the vicar's excellent literary manners and competence as a reporter, and his apparently imperfect recognition of what he is reporting, produces considerable piquancy. For example, he fails to identify Squire Thormhill's dubious guests in the fact of very plain evidence of their true character, which he presents as sharply as we could wish:

The ladies of the town strove hard to be equally easy [i.e. compared with Olivia], but without success. They swam, sprawled, languished, and frisked; but all would not do: the gazers indeed owned that it was fine; but neighbour Flamborough observed, that Miss Livy's feet seemed as pat to the music as its echo.… One of them, I thought, expressed her sentiments upon this occasion in a very coarse manner, when she observed, that by the living jingo, she was all of a muck of sweat. Upon our return to the house, we found a very elegant cold supper.…

In conversation with the vicar's wife and daughters

… they once or twice mortified us sensibly by slipping out an oath; but that appeared to me as the surest symptom of their distinction, (tho' I am since informed that swearing is perfectly unfashionable.) Their finery, however, threw a veil over any grossness in their conversation. (Ch. IX)

Goldsmith endows the vicar here with a shifting and slightly ambiguous persona, such as humorous writers have adopted to portray absurdities without immediately exploding them. We are accustomed to a shifting persona in Gulliver's Travels, though misguided readers in recent times have tried to establish consistency. Two chapters later the proposal is made to find jobs in London for Olivia and Sophia through these ladies' good offices, and the vicar registers not the slightest suspicion. There is no way of accounting for this except by recognizing that here we have a literary joke, which consists in stretching the credulity of a character beyond intelligibility. But The Vicar of Wakefield would not be the masterpiece it is if Goldsmith's strategies were not also a vehicle of meaning; though by its very nature the meaning is not to be precisely defined. Eighteenth-century fiction may be an issue of artifices, but ultimately we judge it as an imaginative statement about life. In exploring further the treatment of the vicar's relations with Mr. Thornhill we must try to understand what this highly artificial work is achieving.

In the passage where the vicar and his family receive from the landlord of an inn their first information about Mr. Thornhill the vicar's narrative gives Augustan neatness and polish and a flavour of comedy of manners, as well as moral correctness, to his statement:

This gentleman he described as one who desired to know little more of the world than its pleasures, being particularly remarkable for his attachment to the fair sex. He observed that no virtue was able to resist his arts and assiduity, and that scarce a farmer's daughter within ten miles round but what had found him successful arid faithless. Though this account gave me some pain, it had a very different effect upon my daughters, whose features seemed to brighten with the expectation of an approaching triumph, nor was my wife less pleased and confident of their allurements and virtue. (Ch. III)

The sexual response of the female members of the family rather modifies the image of ideal domestic, social and Christian order which, in an equally composed style, he describes in the next chapter:

The little republic to which I gave laws, was regulated in the following manner: by sun-rise we all assembled in our common appartment; the fire being previously kindled by the servant. After we had saluted each other with proper ceremony, for I always thought fit to keep up some mech-anical forms of good breeding, without which freedom ever destroys friendship, we all bent in gratitude to that Being who gave us another day. (Ch. IV)

The order so felicitously depicted by the vicar is continually subverted by the elementary follies and vanities of wife and daughters in ways that could only occur in literature. Only in literature could the harmony and its disruption co-exist on such easy terms. Contradictions in real life could be much more complex and disturbing.

Sociability between the squire and the vicar's family immediately develops. When Mr. Thornhill makes an offer which amounts to a proposal to take Olivia into 'keeping', the vicar's resentment is on the grounds of honour, of which his family has the nicest sense: 'Honour, sir, is our only possession at present, and of that last treasure we must be particularly careful', as if family honour were the only issue at stake. We must ask ourselves whether the vicar's urbanity as a host, his reluctance to mention sin and damnation on a social occasion, accounts for this response, or whether some Augustan principle of moderation prompts him to withhold the more solemn sanctions when principles drawn from social custom are adequate for the occasion. He goes as far as urbanity could go when he apologizes for speaking so warmly, and Mr. Thomhill goes as far as moral unawareness (or is it insolence?) could go when he says:

'I protest nothing was farther from my heart than such a thought. No, by all that's tempting, the virtue that will stand a regular siege was never to my taste; for all my amours are carried by a coup de main.' (Ch. IX)

These words offend the two whores, who then

began a very discreet and serious dialogue upon virtue: in this my wife, the chaplain, and 1, soon joined; and the 'Squire himself was at last brought to confess a sense of sorrow for his former excesses. We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and of the sunshine in the mind unpolluted with guilt.… Mr. Thornhill even went beyond me, and demanded if I had any objection to giving prayers. (Ch. IX)

What are we to make of this; that is, if explanations need to be attempted? One view might be that the vicar's complaisance, respectable in this situation, is exploited by the cynical Thornhill, who then fools him with his assumed piety. But Goldsmith's game is surely more interesting than this. In a society where such mixtures of moral types might occur in company, rôles could change in unexpected ways. It is almost as surprising to find the vicar's wife discoursing on virtue as the London ladies. Can we be sure that the rake, if not genuine in his wish for prayers, is not at least desirous of making a conventionally harmonious gesture? But it must again be stressed that Goldsmith is not depicting his world realistically. His story demands distortions of attitudes and rôles. Yet such passages may tell us more about the eighteenth century, and the chaotic pressures and confusions within a society that liked to see itself in orderly terms, than straight social history. They are not translatable into social history, but they provide us with images of the comic imagination which raise questions about the reality.

These are not the images for which the book is best known, and most of those who have loved it have associated it with less problematic issues. The Vicar of Wakefield may be numbered among those late eighteenth-century texts, along with Cowper's The Task of nearly two decades later, in which the love of nature and the love of domesticity are pleasantly combined: an unpretentious expression of the English spirit which has become permanent., As in The Task, the drinking of tea gives completion to the Englishness:

At a small distance from the house my predecessor had made a seat, overshaded by an hedge of hawthorn and honeysuckle. Here, when the weather was fine, and our labour soon finished, we usually sate together, to enjoy an extensive landscape, in the calm of the evening. Here too we drank tea.… (Ch. V)

Older features of the English popular tradition are also represented with an agreeable explicitness and fullness that remind one of Washington Irving's Sketch Book, another work which was endlessly reprinted in the nineteenth century. And, of course, Goldsmith, like Irving, has the viewpoint of a non-English connoisseur of the scene. The Virgilian O fortunatos … agricolas, another eighteenth-century theme, is in the background of the following passage:

Remote from the polite, they still retained the primaeval simplicity of manners, and frugal by habit, they scarce knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with chearfulness on days of labour; but observed festivals as intervals of idleness and pleasure. They kept up the Christmas carol, sent true love-knots on Valentine morning, eat pancakes on Shrove-tide, shewed their wit on the first of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas eve. (Ch.IV)

The style is such that it does not matter in the least whether any such rural perfection still existed, or had ever existed. The truth about any rural community would in any case include more than is suggested here. And there is the most obvious and elementary favourite: the episode of the green spectacles. It may not be a great example of wit, but it has no doubt been the sole representative of the coney-catching genre for countless readers. The gullibility of the innocent is one of the most familiar of themes and in this story the combination of the amusing with the innocuous was to be an infallible recommendation in the coming century. But there is more than this. With his genius for simplicity Goldsmith creates something like a fairy tale.

The twentieth century, which looks closely into texts and can even find a satirical intention in this one, may not easily appreciate Goldsmith's success in creating a work which became a legend. One understands only too well why Thackeray, after recoiling from Steme, should have taken such pleasure in the thought of Goldsmith's 'sweet story'. With a few passages taken out it meets Victorian requirements for domestic literature, but this does not help its reputation today. This aspect of the legend is relevant historically because when the nineteenth century, so concerned with improvement, looked at the past, it was glad to have figures like Addison, Goldsmith and Cowper to represent a century in which other figures were in some respects alien or disquieting. But Goldsmith's more lasting achievement was the creation of a work which conveys quintessentially and with wonderful freshness certain parts of the English scene in an age when the scene was about to change. His instinctive sense of history, his artist's recognition of his rôle in relation to the changing world, is exquisitely manifest in his choice of subject for The Deserted Village. This was a poem that had to be written, and his authorship of this very special epitaph would be enough to place Goldsmith among the immortals, if he had done nothing else. The Vicar of Wakefield has none of its poignant feeling for worlds lost or about to be lost. And yet it too is a monument. Goldsmith could not have realized in what sense it was to be a monument, because he could not have foreseen the impossibility in the fiction of later periods of the peculiarly Augustan combination of elements present here. As a recapitulation in miniature of so many old fictional motifs it is an appropriate product of the decade before the old tradition ceased with the death of Smollett. As a personal achievement, a work of art within the limits of a genius that is at ease with its limits, it stands as a monument to virtues which greater writers of later periods have not always shown.

Notes

¹ All quotations from Goldsmith are given from the text of the Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1966). Volume and page numbers of this edition are cited except for quotations from The Vicar of Wakefield which have only chapter numbers.

² Donald A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth-century England (Princeton and Oxford, 1941), p. 383.

³ D. W. Jefferson, 'Observations on The Vicar of Wakefield', The Cambridge Journal, 3, No. 10 (1950), pp. 621-28.

⁴ Robert H. Hopkins, The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 166-230. Sven Backman's This Singular Tale. A Study of 'The Vicar of Wakefield' and its Literary Background (Lund, 1971), which contributes valuable information and insights on points relating to the vicar and other characters, follows Stuart Tave, with some reservations, in placing the vicar among the 'amiable humorists'.

⁵ This principle applies to the question 'How witty is he?' Ronald Paulson attributes wit to him, but if he is credited with all of Goldsmith's wit his naivety becomes difficult to place. See Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven and London, 1967), p. 271.