Oliver Goldsmith哥尔斯密简介

Oliver Goldsmith哥尔斯密简介

Oliver Goldsmith

born Nov. 10, 1730, Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ire.

died April 4, 1774, London

, Oliver Goldsmith, oil painting from the studio of Sir Joshua

Reynolds, 1770; in the National „

Anglo-Irish essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made

famous by such works as the series of essays The Citizen of the

World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), the poem The

Deserted Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and

the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773).

Goldsmith was the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, the Rev. Charles

Goldsmith, curate in charge of Kilkenny West, County Westmeath. At

about

the time of his birth, the family moved into a substantial house at

nearby

Lissoy, where Oliver spent his childhood. Much has been recorded

concerning his youth, his unhappy years as an undergraduate at

Trinity

College, Dublin, where he received the B.A. degree in February 1749,

and

his many misadventures before he left Ireland in the autumn of 1752

to

study in the medical school at Edinburgh. His father was now dead,

but

several of his relations had undertaken to support him in his

pursuit of

a medical degree. Later on, in London, he came to be known as Dr.

Goldsmith—Doctor being the courtesy title for one who held the

Bachelor

of Medicine—but he took no degree while at Edinburgh nor, so far as

anyone

knows, during the two-year period when, despite his meagre funds,

which

were eventually exhausted, he somehow managed to make his way

through

Europe. The first period of his life ended with his arrival in

London,

bedraggled and penniless, early in 1756.

Goldsmith's rise from total obscurity was a matter of only a few

years.

He worked as an apothecary's assistant, school usher, physician, and

as

a hack writer—reviewing, translating, and compiling. Much of his

work

was for Ralph Griffiths's Monthly Review. It remains amazing that

this young Irish vagabond, unknown, uncouth, unlearned, and unreliable,

was

yet able within a few years to climb from obscurity to mix with

aristocrats

and the intellectual elite of London. Such a rise was possible

because

Goldsmith had one quality, soon noticed by booksellers and the

public,

that his fellow literary hacks did not possess—the gift of a

graceful, lively, and readable style. His rise began with the Enquiry

into the

Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a minor work.

Soon he emerged as an essayist, in The Bee and other periodicals, and

above all in his Chinese Letters. These essays were first published in

the journal

The Public Ledger and were collected as The Citizen of the World in

1762.

The same year brought his Life of Richard Nash, of Bath, Esq.

Already

Goldsmith was acquiring those distinguished and often helpful

friends

whom he alternately annoyed and amused, shocked and charmed—Samuel

Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Percy, David Garrick, Edmund

Burke,

and James Boswell. The obscure drudge of 1759 became in 1764 one of

the

nine founder-members of the famous Club, a select body, including

Reynolds,

Johnson, and Burke, which met weekly for supper and talk. Goldsmith

could

now afford to live more comfortably, but his extravagance

continually ran

him into debt, and he was forced to undertake more hack work. He

thus

produced histories of England and of ancient Rome and Greece,

biographies,

verse anthologies, translations, and works of popular science. These

were

mainly compilations of works by other authors, which Goldsmith then

distilled and enlivened by his own gift for fine writing. Some of

these

makeshift compilations went on being reprinted well into the 19th

century,

however.

By 1762 Goldsmith had established himself as an essayist with his

Citizen

of the World, in which he used the device of satirizing Western

society

through the eyes of an Oriental visitor to London. By 1764 he had

won a

reputation as a poet with The Traveller, the first work to which he

put

his name. It embodied both his memories of tramping through Europe

and

his political ideas. In 1770 he confirmed that reputation with the

more

famous Deserted Village, which contains charming vignettes of rural

life while denouncing the evictions of the country poor at the hands of

wealthy

landowners. In 1766 Goldsmith revealed himself as a novelist with

The

Vicar of Wakefield (written in 1762), a portrait of village life

whose

idealization of the countryside, sentimental moralizing, and

melodramatic incidents are underlain by a sharp but good-natured

irony.

In 1768 Goldsmith turned to the theatre with The Good Natur'd Man,

which

was followed in 1773 by the much more effective She Stoops to

Conquer,

which was immediately successful. This play has outlived almost all

other

English-language comedies from the early 18th to the late 19th

century

by virtue of its broadly farcical horseplay and vivid, humorous

characterizations.

During his last decade Goldsmith's conversational encounters with

Johnson

and others, his foolishness, and his wit were preserved in Boswell's

Life

of Samuel Johnson. Goldsmith eventually became deeply embroiled in

mounting debts despite his considerable earnings as an author,

though,

and after a short illness in the spring of 1774 he died.

When Oliver Goldsmith died he had achieved eminence among the

writers of

his time as an essayist, a poet, and a dramatist. He was one “who

left

scarcely any kind of writing untouched and who touched nothing that

he

did not adorn”—such was the judgment expressed by his friend Dr.

Johnson.

His contemporaries were as one in their high regard for Goldsmith

the

writer, but they were of different minds concerning the man himself.

He

was, they all agreed, one of the oddest personalities of his time.

Of

established Anglo-Irish stock, he kept his brogue and his provincial

manners in the midst of the sophisticated Londoners among whom he

moved.

His bearing was undistinguished, and he was unattractive

physically—ugly,

some called him—with ill-proportioned features and a pock-marked

face.

He was a poor manager of his own affairs and an inveterate gambler,

wildly

extravagant when in funds, generous sometimes beyond his means to

people

in distress. The graceful fluency with words that he commanded as a

writer

deserted him totally when he was in society—his conversational

mishaps were memorable things. Instances were also cited of his

incredible vanity,

of his constant desire to be conspicuous in company, and of his envy

of

others' achievements. In the end what most impressed Goldsmith's

contemporaries was the paradox he presented to the world: on the one

hand

the assured and polished literary artist, on the other the person

notorious for his ineptitudes in and out of society. Again it was

Johnson

who summed up the common sentiment. “No man,” he declared, “was

more

foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he

had.”

Goldsmith's success as a writer lay partly in the charm of

personality

emanated by his style—his affection for his characters, his

mischievous

irony, and his spontaneous interchange of gaiety and sadness. He was,

as

a writer, “natural, simple, affecting.” It is by their human

personalities that his novel and his plays succeed, not by any

brilliance

of plot, ideas, or language. In the poems again it is the characters

that

are remembered rather than the landscapes—the village parson, the

village schoolmaster, the sharp, yet not unkindly portraits of Garrick

and Burke. Goldsmith's poetry lives by its own special softening and

mellowing of the traditional heroic couplet into simple melodies

that are

quite different in character from the solemn and sweeping lines of

18th-century blank verse. In his novel and plays Goldsmith helped to

humanize his era's literary imagination, without growing sickly or

mawkish. Goldsmith saw people, human situations, and indeed the

human

predicament from the comic point of view; he was a realist,

something of

a satirist, but in his final judgments unfailingly charitable.

The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. by Arthur Friedman, 5

vol. (1966), supersedes all other collected editions. The Collected

Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. by K.C. Balderston (1928), is standard.

All of

the poetry, together with full notes and extensive commentary, is

given

in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith,

ed.

by R.H. Lonsdale (1969). The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver

Goldsmith,

ed. by A. Dobson (1906), is still valuable for its commentary and

notes,

as is the edition of the plays by A. Dobson and G.P. Baker, The Good

Natur'd

Man and She Stoops to Conquer (1905). The standard edition of The

Vicar of Wakefield is that edited by Arthur Friedman (1974).

The authoritative biography is R.M. Wardle, Oliver Goldsmith (1957).

G.S. Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage (1974), provides

views on Goldsmith by his contemporaries. Useful critical studies

include C.M.

Kirk, Oliver Goldsmith (1967); Ricardo Quintana, Oliver Goldsmith: A

Georgian Study (1967); and R.H. Hopkins, The True Genius of Oliver

Goldsmith (1969).