THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

contradictory and disordered critical voices currently raised in favour of ‘blank verse, and Pindaric odes, chorusses,
anapests and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence’; the poem itself employs the already somewhat
conservative couplet form and it preaches the vanity of searching the external world for a bliss ‘which only centers in
the mind’.
The Traveller glancingly retraces Goldsmith’s own earlier wanderings through France, Switzerland, and Italy
before a return to an England caught up with a pursuit of political liberty and with a related, but less socially
desirable, commercial ambition. It presents an impression of a morally educational journey rather than a sentimental
one. In its strange insistence on the depopulation both of Italian cities and, more emphatically, of the English
countryside it also contains the germ of The Deserted Village (1770). Where the earlier poem sees emigration as a
result of laws that ‘grind the poor’ enacted by rich, self seeking, and powerful champions of liberty, The Deserted
Village indirectly attacks the enclosure system (by which peasants were deprived of common land by successive Acts
of Parliament) and more directly protests against the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and against the
creation of a private ‘luxury ... curst by Heaven’s decree’. ‘Sweet Auburn’, the ‘loveliest village of the plain’, has been
destroyed by the effects of aristocratic, mercantile, or simply urban ‘luxury’. Auburn is, however, unlocated (though
some commentators have sought to place it in Goldsmith’s native Ireland). Once a harmoniously working village
which has now vanished, it seems bathed in the golden evening light of nostalgia. Most prominent amongst its
lovingly recalled inhabitants is its spiritual guide and moral arbiter, a parish priest ‘passing rich’ on forty pounds a
year, a man content to run his godly race remote alike from towns and from hopes of ecclesiastical preferment.
The figure of an unworldly priest recurs in both The Citizen of the World (1762) and the philosophical tale The
Vicar of Wakefield (1766). The ‘Man in Black’, innocently observed by the ‘Chinese Philosopher residing in London’
of The Citizen of the World, is generous to a fault; he is exploited because of the very nature of his charity, but he
proves to be no more gullible than the Chinese narrator he has taken under his wing. The device of using an alien
innocent abroad as a commentator on the whims and hypocrisies of European society was scarcely new (it had been
used by Addison in The Spectator and, more recently and more trenchantly, by Montesquieu in France), but
Goldsmith’s
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oriental sage, Lien Chi Altangi, appears to be as fascinated by his fellow innocents as he is by the vanity, dress, law,
literature, and cocksure pomposity of his English hosts. The appropriately named Dr Primrose, the freshly innocent
‘priest ... husbandman ... and father of a family’ of The Vicar of Wakefield, shares something of Lien Chi Altangi’s
calm, gentle, even fastidious, detachment in the face of confusion. Primrose’s circumstances are, however, both more
dire and more personal and he bears them with a Job-like patience. As the recounter of the misfortunes which befall
him and his family, he is also required to defuse emotionally charged situations by asserting the comfortable virtues of
temperance and faith. The words ‘prudent’ and ‘prudence’ recur throughout his extraordinarily symmetrical
narrative. It is a tragic story concerned with sensibility not with sensation, with pity not with terror, and carefully
restrains the tearful emotions which had earlier been indulged by writers such as Brooke and Mackenzie. In the eighth
chapter of his second volume, Dr Primrose compares himself to a legislator ‘who had brought men from their native
ferocity into friendship and obedience’. Although he never really asserts himself, and never seeks to pose as a political
or domestic tyrant in his little republic, he none the less attempts to act as a moral persuader, firm in his belief in the
benign workings of divine providence. Despite his frequent ineffectualness, Primrose is one of the blessed meek whose
inheritance is ultimately allowed to be a well-ordered patch of earth.
‘Our taste has gone back a whole century, Fletcher, Ben Johnson (sic), and all the plays of Shakespear, are the
only things that go down’, remarks a ‘poor player’ encountered by Dr Primrose on his travels. The player later asserts
that in his experience ‘Congreve and Farquhar have too much wit in them for the present taste’. Goldsmith’s two
shapely and commercially successful plays, The Good-Natur’d Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773), only
partially bear out the truth of the player’s observation. In his ‘Essay on the Theatre’, also of 1773, Goldsmith himself
had drawn a clear distinction between what he saw as ‘laughing and sentimental comedy’, that is between a satirical
laughing away of faults and an emotional stimulus to sympathetic tears. If it is sometimes hard to recognize
Goldsmith as a direct theatrical heir to either Jonson or Congreve, his plays suggest a more forthright moralist than
do his poems and his fiction. He claims to have distrusted the kind of comedy which ‘aims at touching our passions,
instead of being truly pathetic’. Goldsmith’s remarks in the ‘Essay’ are likely to have been directed, in part, against
the plays of his contemporary Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), the author of the sentimental comedies The West
Indian (1771) and The Fashionable Lover (1772). Cumberland was later caricatured by Richard Brinsley Sheridan as
Sir Fretwell Plagiary in The Critic (1779). Goldsmith and his fellow Irishman, Sheridan (1751-1816), share a certain
acerbity of wit and an ebullient criticism of affectation which is generally absent from the exploration of tearful
neuroses by the proponents of sensibility. Both prefer the poignant to the passionate, the witty to the lacrimose. The
plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan reveal a positive, but newly