CHAPTER XVI. THEATRES ROYAL COVENT GARDEN AND DRURY LANE. 1767. THE opening, then, of the twelfth year of Oliver Goldsmith's career as a man of letters, which finds him author of the Citizen of the World, the Traveller, and the Vicar of Wakefield, finds him also writing a short English grammar for five guineas, and borrowing of his publisher the sum of one pound one. But thus scantily eking out his necessities with hack employment and parsimonious lendings, his dramatic labour had meanwhile been in progress. The venture I have described as in the dawn, was now about to struggle into day. He had taken for his model the older English comedy. He thought Congreve's astonishing wit too exuberant for the stage; and, for truth to nature, vivacity, life, and spirit, placed Farquhar first. With what was called the genteel or sentimental school that had since prevailed, and of which Steele was the originator, he felt no sympathy; and cared chiefly for the Jealous Wife and the Clandestine Marriage because they had shown the power to break those trammels. What his countryman Farquhar had done, he resolved to attempt; and in that hearty hope had planned his play. With the help of nature, humour, and character, should these be in his reach, he would invoke the spirit of 1767. Æt. 39. 1767. laughter, happy, unrestrained, and cordial: all the more Et. 39. surely, as he reckoned, if with Garrick's help, and King's, and Yates's; though without them, if so compelled. For not in their names, or after Garrick's fashion, had he set down his exits and entrances,* nor to suit peculiarities of theirs were his mirthful incidents devised. Upon no stage picture of the humourous, however vivid, but upon what he had seen and known, himself, of the humourous in actual life, he was determined to venture all; believing that what was real in manners, however broad or low, if in decency endurable and pointing to no illiberal moral, could never justly be condemned as vulgar. And for this he had Johnson's approval. Indifferent to nothing that affected his friend, nor ever sluggish where help was wanted or active kindness needed to be done, Johnson promised to write a prologue to the comedy. For again had he lately shown himself in Gerrard-street; again had the club reunited its members; and, once more in the society of Reynolds, Johnson, and Burke, Goldsmith was eager to forget his carking poverty, and count up his growing pretensions to greatness and esteem. What Boswell calls "one of the most remarkable incidents "of Johnson's life," was now matter of conversation at the club. In February, the King had taken occasion to see and hold some conversation with him on one of his visits to the royal library, where by permission of the librarian he frequently consulted books. The effect produced by the incident is a social curiosity of the time. Endless was the interest of it; the marvel of it never to be done with. "He loved to relate it with all its circumstances," says * See ante, 26-7. And for a strong condemnation of the practice, see the Citizen of the World, letter lxxix. Boswell, "when requested by his friends:" and "Come now, sir, this is an interesting matter; do favour us with "it," was the cry of every friend in turn. So, often was the story repeated. How the King had asked Johnson if he was then writing anything, and he had answered he was not, for he had pretty well told the world what he knew, and must now read to acquire more knowledge. How the King said he did not think Johnson borrowed much from anybody; and the other venturing to think he had done his part as a writer, was handsomely assured "I would have 66 thought so too, if you had not written so well." How his majesty next observed that he supposed he must already have read a great deal, to which Johnson replied that he thought more than he read, and for instance had not read much, compared with Doctor Warburton; whereto the King rejoined that he heard Doctor Warburton was a man of such general knowledge that his learning resembled Garrick's acting in its universality. How his majesty afterwards asked if there were any other literary journals published in the kingdom, except the Monthly Review and Critical Review, and being told there was no other, enquired which of them was best; whereupon Johnson replied that the Monthly Review was done with most care, and the Critical upon the best principles, for that the authors of the Monthly were enemies to the church: which the King said he was sorry to hear. How his majesty talked of the university libraries, of Sir John Hill's veracity, and of Lord Lyttelton's history; and how he proposed that the literary biography of the country should be undertaken by Johnson, who thereupon signified his readiness to comply with the royal wishes (of which he never heard another syllable). How, during the whole of the interview, to use the description 1767. Æt. 39. VOL. II. E 1767. given to Boswell by the librarian, Johnson talked to his Et. 39. majesty with profound respect, but still in his firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice, and never in that subdued tone which is commonly used at the levee and in the drawing-room. And how, at the end of it, the flattered sage protested that the manners of the bucolic young sovereign, "let them talk of them as they will," were those of as fine a gentleman as Louis the Fourteenth or Charles the Second could have been.* "Ah!" said the charmed and charming Sévigné, when her King had danced with her, "c'est le plus "grand roi du monde !" "And did you say nothing, sir," asked one of the circle who stood round Johnson at Mr. Reynolds's when he detailed the interview there, " to the King's high compliment "on your writing?" "No sir," answered Johnson, with admirable taste. "When the King had said it, it was to be 66 66 So. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my Sovereign." Highly characteristic of him was what he added as his opinion of the advantage of such an interview. "I found," he said, in answer to the frank and lively questioning of Joseph Warton, "his majesty wished I should talk, and I made it my business to talk. I find it does a man good to be talked to by his Sovereign. In the "first place a man cannot be in a passion—" Here he was stopped; but he had said enough. The consciousness of his own too frequent habit of roaring down an adversary in conversation, from which such men as the Wartons as well as Goldsmith suffered, could hardly have been more amusingly confessed; and it is possible that Joseph Warton may have remembered it in the courteous severity of his retort, when Johnson so fiercely fell upon him at Reynolds's + Boswell, iii. 27. Boswell, iii. 22-27. 1767. Our Æt. 39. a few years later. "Sir, I am not used to be contradicted." One of the listeners standing near Johnson, when he began his narrative, had, during the course of it, silently retreated from the circle. "Doctor Goldsmith," says Boswell, "remained unmoved upon a sofa at some distance, affecting "not to join in the least in the eager curiosity of the company. He assigned as a reason for his gloom and seeming inattention, that he apprehended Johnson had "relinquished his purpose of furnishing him with a Prologue "to his play, with the hopes of which he had been flattered; "but it was strongly suspected that he was fretting with chagrin and envy at the singular honour Doctor Johnson "had lately enjoyed. At length the frankness and simplicity of his natural character prevailed. He sprung "from the sofa, advanced to Johnson, and in a kind of flutter, from imagining himself in the situation which he "had just been hearing described, exclaimed, 'Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I 66 6 should have done; for I should have bowed and stam"mered through the whole of it.'" 66 66 6 Poor Goldsmith might have reason to be anxious about his prologue, for his play had brought him nothing but anxiety. "In theatro sedet atra cura." A letter lies before me from Horace Walpole's neighbour, Kitty Clive, who writes expressively though she spells ill (the great Mrs. Pritchard used to talk of her "gownd"), assuring her friend Colman that "vexation and fretting in a theater are * Wooll's Biographical Memoirs of Joseph Warton, 98. + So Johnson told Mrs. Siddons; "but," he added, "when she appeared upon "the stage she seemed to be inspired by gentility and understanding." Boswell, viii. 238. Perhaps he connected her uneasily with his recollections of Irene ; |