Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774) was, like Dryden, Addison, Gay and Johnson, an
Augustan all-rounder, writing an analytic Essay on the Present State of Polite Letters
(1759), fiction in The Vicar of Wakefield (1776), poetry, notably The Deserted Village
(1770) and, in She Stoops to Conquer (1773), a fine comedy, as well as much hack-
work. Boswell said that Goldsmith ‘wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll’; he
was helped by Johnson, rather as Pope had helped Gay.The Vicar of Wakefield is
about the misfortunes of an innocent clergyman and his family, a Fielding-like plot
without Fielding’s satire. It was a huge success, but has little in the way of insides.
This 18th-century externality works better in his equally successful She Stoops to
Conquer, a comedy of one night’s mistakes: Mr Hardcastle’s house is taken for an
inn (thanks to a misdirection by Tony Lumpkin of The Three Jolly Pigeons), and
his daughter Kate for a serving-girl; whom her supposedly shy official suitor tries
to seduce. All ends well in this good-natured anti-sentimental comedy, often
revived.
The title ofThe Deserted Village gives the theme. ‘Sweet Auburn, loveliest village
of the plain’ is the sign of a rural England losing its people. When the fictional author
returns to his birthplace, he finds it ruined by ‘One only master’, who ‘rules the whole
domain’.
Il l fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Pr inces 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.
Gone are the villager s and the schoolmaster (‘And still they gazed, and still their
wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew’) and the inn. He
fondly remembers: ‘The white-washed wall, the nicely sanded floor, / The
varnished clock that clicked behind the door.’ The empty countryside has been
rearranged so that ‘Its vistas strike, its palaces surprize’ and ‘The country blooms – a
garden and a grave.’ Nostalgia turns to politics: ‘I see the rural virtues leave the land.’
As in Gray’s Progress of Poesy, Poetry loves Liberty. Before emigrating, she warns that
States ‘of native strength possest, / Tho’ very poor, may still be very blest.’ Fluency
turns to concentration as the next lines teach
That trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the labour’d mole away; constructed pier
While self-dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky.
This conclusion was written by Johnson, the Augustan breakwater defying the
rising tide of Romanticism. His values carried on into the 19th century in the
journals and letters of Hester Thrale and Fanny Burney, author ofEvelina and
Cecilia, and the verse of the Rev. George Crabbe. Johnson hated false pastoral and
admired Crabbe’s The Village (1783) as a true picture of hard rural life. The
couplet narratives of Crabbe’s later Borough and Tales make a good contrast with
Wordsworth’s ballads on similar themes. Crabbe went on writing them until
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