Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) was not such a strait-laced classicist that he could not see good in Richardson's brand of sentimentality. In fact, he approved of it: however, not without some reservations and the thought that a dash of whimsey and humor might improve it. As for those perfervid souls who yearned for something more intense and drastic in the way of sentiment, he would have none of them. One of the objectives of the Vicar of Wakefield¹ was to act as a sedative and febrifuge, and at the same time to set an example of feeling properly controlled.

As a classicist Goldsmith could not believe in the natural goodness of man in theory, but his heart was tender and he sympathized with the unfortunate and refused to believe that any man was irredeemably depraved. Although not exactly a primitivist, he thought certain traits of the natural or uncivilized man superior to those of some Europeans. The savage, directed by natural law, seldom sheds blood except in revenge. But as society grows older and richer, it becomes morose and erects gibbets around its property. Severe and indiscriminate penal laws and the licentiousness of the people make more convicts in England than in half of Europe. The enormous number of laws produces new vices, and these in turn call for new laws, and thus law becomes the tyrant, not the protector, of the people. In "The Deserted Village" he warned against the danger of luxury, and with the fall of Rome in mind, feared that disorders in England caused by luxurious and wasteful living might destroy the nation.

In his opinion the sentimentalist who uses his pretended virtue, his good heart, as a blind for selfish indulgence is a base hypocrite. Goldsmith censured certain playwrights for giving in their sentimental pieces a one-sided picture of domestic life, omitting its faults and presenting only its virtues, and teaching the spectators to pardon, or even applaud the foibles of sentimental characters in consideration of the goodness of their hearts, with the result that folly, instead of being castigated, was approved. Doubtless he expected the good novelist to avoid these faults. One should look squarely at life, refuse to apologize for the sentimentalist who seeks to escape from a moral-ity which galls his kibe, and avoid viewing things through the false lens of romance. Goldsmith believed in love and did not think that it should be put in chains by the Marriage Act, but as for romantic matches and ecstatic raptures, they were found only innovels.

The Narcissus who parades his benevolence before as many as he can get to look at him is a pretender. Better far than such ostentation is the mask of misanthropy worn by the Man in Black,² who hides his tender heart behind a forbidding exterior and gives whenever an appeal is made to his sympathy. But impulsive benevolence is bad. Even Sir Charles Grandison was careful not to give alms to professional beggars.

Sir William Thornhill is a man of feeling who has learned his lesson. As a youth his "passions were … strong, and as they were all on the side of virtue, they led it [i.e., benevolence] up to a romantic extreme." He had a sympathy for all mankind and a high opinion of men because the people who surrounded him took care to show him only the good side of their character. As he saw only the suppliant faces, he felt exquisitely the suffering of all, and "his soul laboured under a sickly sensibility of the miseries of others." So he gave until. his money was all gone and he could give nothing but promises. Then the almsmen were dissatisfied and left him with reproaches and contemptuous remarks. Without their praise he felt very despicable, but their ingratitude brought him to his senses. Now he is careful to bestow his bounties upon more worthy people. He masquerades as Burchell in hopes of finding a woman who, disregarding rank and wealth, will marry him because of his merits as a man.

Goldsmith's kind of sentimentality is purged of affectation and excesses, and it is solidly based on a normal and healthy development of the sympathetic imagination. In it there is no cult of melancholy, although there is a touch of it in the scene where Olivia sings "When lovely woman stoops to folly," and the Primroses breakfast together on the honeysuckle bank where she had first met Squire Ned Thornhill, her seducer. Every object recalled her sadness. "But that melancholy," writes the author, "which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, soothes the heart instead of corroding it." On this occasion Livy's mother too felt a "pleasing distress" and wept and loved her daughter as never before.

Goldsmith put not a little of himself in the Vicar of Wakefield, for through Sir William Thornhill (alias Burchell) he expresses his opinions, through George Primrose he gives a sketch of his own past, and he steeped the whole novel in the wistful memories of the tired London author dreaming of the pastoral simplicity and delicious serenity of his boyhood days. The book conforms to the sentimental pattern of a variety of trying scenes, yet it is uncommon because of its idyllic quality and because there is much more to it than just the stories of the two heroines. It is concerned with the whole Primrose family, and Parson Primrose as the pater familias is the most important figure. Sir William, the guardian angel of the family (a little like Sir Charles Lisdale in Sarah Fielding's Ophelia), is a younger Dr. Harrison and belongs to the Grandison type. The Vicar himself is a variant of the same type with traits from Abraham Adams. But he lacks the burly stoutness and grotesqueness of Fielding's parson. Although somewhat proud of his erudition and slightly mad on the subject of monogamy, at bottom the Vicar is sound and an enemy of false social ambition, pretense, affectation, and the tawdry finery of Vanity Fair, as is shown by his reproving of his wife and daughters when they tried to cut a fine figure before the parishioners. As with Adams, his honesty and good-heartedness blind him to the duplicity of scheming knaves. Besides he is prone to judge a man by his appearance and badly needs the lesson taught to Adams when that worthy was taken in by the fellow with the sweet face of a primitive Christian.

The author himself would have been the first to admit that as the world goes, things do not commonly turn out so well as they do in the novel, for he believed wordly prosperity depended more often on prudence than on virtue. Yet it is fitting that the ending should have a bit of the fairy tale about it, for wish fulfillment is not out of place in such a wistful sentimental story. Few of the readers of the hundred and more editions of the Vicar of Wakefield have expressed dissatisfaction with the happy outcome of events, and all have thought the novel, in spite of the fact that there is little absolutely new either in character or plot, one of the world's most delightful narratives.

Notes

¹ Written in 1762 and published in 1766.

²Citizen of the World, Letter XXVI.