HE occupied one room in the farmhouse—the guest-chamber it had probably been called when the farm was young. It was a pretty spacious apartment up one pair of stairs and to the right of the landing, and from its window there was a pleasing prospect of a paddock with wheat-fields beyond; there was a drop in the landscape in the direction of Hendon, and here was a little wood. The farmer's name was Selby, a married man with a son of sixteen, and younger children, and the farmhouse was the nearest building to the sixth milestone on the Edgware Road in the year 1771.

He was invariably alluded to as “The Gentleman,” and the name did very well for him, situated as he was in the country; in the town and among his acquaintances it would serve badly as a means of identification. He was never referred to as “The Gentleman” of his circle. In his room in the farmhouse there was his bed and table—a large table littered with books; it took two chaises to carry his books hither from his rooms in the Temple. Here he sat and wrote the greater part of the day, and when he was very busy he would scarcely be able to touch the meals which were sent up to him from the kitchen. But he was by no means that dignified type of the man of letters who would shrink from fellowship with the farmer or his family. He would frequently come down his stairs into the kitchen and stand with his back to the fire, conversing with the housewife, and offering her his sympathy when she had made him aware of the fact that the privilege of being the wife of a substantial farmer, though undoubtedly fully recognised by the world, carried many troubles in its train, not only in connection with the vicissitudes of churning, but in regard to the feeding of the calves, which no man could attend to properly, and the making of the damson and cowslip wine. He told her that the best maker of cowslip wine whom he had ever met was a Mrs. Primrose; her husband had at one time occupied the Vicarage of Wakefield—he wondered if Mrs. Selby had ever heard of her. Mrs. Selby's knowledge did not go so far, but she thought that Mrs. Primrose's recipe must be a good one indeed if it brought forth better results than her own; and the gentleman said that although he had never tasted Mrs. Selby's he would still have no hesitation in backing it for flavour, body, headiness, and all other qualities associated with the distillation of the cowslip, against the Primrose brand.

And then he would stare at the gammon in the rafter and mutter some words, burst into a roar of laughter, and stumble upstairs to his writing, leaving the good woman to thank Heaven that she was the wife of a substantial farmer and not of an unsubstantial gentleman of letters, who could not carry on a simple conversation without having some queer thought fly across his brain for all the world like one of the swallows on the water at Hendon, only maybe a deal harder to catch. She knew that the gentleman had hurried to his paper and ink to complete the capture of that fleet-flitting thought which had come to him when he had cast his eyes toward the gammon, though how an idea worth putting on paper—after a few muttered words and a laugh—could lurk about a common piece of hog's-flesh was a mystery to her.

And then upon occasions the gentleman would take a walk abroad; the farmer's son had more than once come upon him strolling about the fields with his hands in his pockets and his head bent toward the ground, still muttering fitfully and occasionally giving a laugh that made the grey pad in the paddock look up slowly, still munching the grass. Now and again he paid a visit to his friend Mr. Hugh Boyd at the village of Kenton, and once he returned late at night from such a visit, without his shoes. He had left them in a quagmire, he said, and it was only with a struggle that he saved himself from being engulfed as well. That was the story of his shoes which young Selby remembered when he was no longer young. And there was another story which he remembered, but it related to his slippers. The fact was that the gentleman had acquired the bad habit of reading in bed, and the table on which his candlestick stood being several feet away from his pillow, he saved himself the trouble of rising to extinguish it by flinging a slipper at it. In the morning the overturned candle was usually found side by side on the floor with an unaccountably greasy slipper. This method of discharging an important domestic duty differed considerably from Johnson's way of compassing the same end. Johnson, being extremely short-sighted, was compelled to hold the candle close to the book when reading in bed, so that he had no need to use his slipper as an extinguisher. No, but he found his pillow very handy for this purpose. When he had finished his reading he threw away the book and went asleep with his candle under his pillow.

The gentleman at the farm went about a good deal in his slippers, and with his shirt loose at the collar—the latter must have been but one of his very customary negligences, or Sir Joshua Reynolds would not have painted him thus. Doubtless the painter had for long recognised the interpretative value of this loosened collar above that of the velvet and silk raiment in which the man sometimes appeared before the wondering eyes of his friends.

But if the painter had never had an opportunity of studying the picturesqueness of his negligence, he had more than one chance of doing so within the farmhouse.

Young Selby recollected that upon at least one occasion Sir Joshua, his friend Sir William Chambers, and Dr. Johnson had paid a visit to the gentleman who lodged at the farm. He remembered that for that reception of so distinguished a company the farmhouse parlour had been opened and tea provided. There must have been a good deal of pleasant talk between the gentleman and his friends at this time, and probably young Selby heard an astonishingly loud laugh coming from the enormous visitor with the brown coat and the worsted stockings, as the gentleman endeavoured to tell his guests something of the strange scenes which he was introducing in the comedy he was writing in that room upstairs. It was then a comedy without a name, but young Selby heard that it was produced the following year in London and that it was called She Stoops to Conquer.

This was the second year that the gentleman had spent at the farm. The previous summer he had been engaged on another work which was certainly as comical as the comedy. It was called Animated Nature, and it comprised some of the most charmingly narrated errors in Natural History ever offered to the public, and the public have always been delighted to read pages of fiction if it is only called “Natural History.” This is one of the best-established facts in the history of the race. After all, Animated Nature was true to half its title: every page was animated.

It was while he was so engaged, with one eye on Buffon and another on his MS., that he found Farmer Selby very useful to him. Farmer Selby knew a great deal about animals—the treatment of horses under various conditions, and the way to make pigs pay; he had probably his theories respecting the profit to be derived from keeping sheep, and how to feed oxen that are kept for the plough. All such knowledge he must have placed at the disposal of the author, though the farmer was possibly too careless an observer of the simple incidents of the fields to be able to verify Buffon's statement, reproduced in Animated Nature, to the effect that cows shed their horns every two years; he was probably also too deficient in the spirit in which a poet sets about the work of compilation to be able to assent to the belief that a great future was in store for the zebra when it should become tame and perform the ordinary duties of a horse. But if the author was somewhat discouraged in his speculations now and again by Farmer Selby, he did not allow his fancy as a naturalist to be wholly repressed. He had heard a story of an ostrich being ridden horsewise in some regions, and of long journeys being accomplished in this way in incredibly short spaces of time, and forthwith his imagination enabled him to see the day when this bird would become as amenable to discipline as the barn-door fowl, though discharging the tasks of a horse, carrying its rider across England with the speed of a racer!

It was while he was engaged on this pleasant work of fancy and imagination that Mr. Boswell paid him a visit, bringing with him as a witness Mr. Mickle, the translator of the Lusiad. “The Gentleman” had gone away for the day, Mrs. Selby explained; but she did not know Mr. Boswell. She could not prevent him from satisfying his curiosity in respect of Dr. Goldsmith. He went upstairs to his room, and he was fully satisfied. He found the walls all scrawled over with outline drawings of quite a number of animals. Having thus satisfied himself that the author of Animated Nature was working in a thoroughly conscientious manner he came away. He records the incident himself, but he does not say whether or not he was able to recognise any of the animals from their pictures.

But now it was a professed and not an unconscious comedy that occupied Dr. Goldsmith. Whatever disappointment he may have felt at the indifferent success of the first performance of The Good-Natured Man—and he undoubtedly felt some—had been amply redeemed by the money which accrued to him from the “author's rights” and the sale of the play; and he had only awaited a little encouragement from the managers to enable him to begin another comedy. But the managers were not encouraging, and he was found by his friends one day to be full of a scheme for the building of a new theatre for the production of new plays, in order that the existing managers might not be able to carry on their tyranny any longer. Such a scheme has been revived every decade since Goldsmith's time, but never with the least success. Johnson, whose sound sense was rarely at fault, laughed at the poet's project for bringing down the mighty from their seats, upon which Goldsmith cried: “Ay, sir, this matter may be nothing to you who can now shelter yourself behind the corner of your pension,” and he doubtless went on to describe the condition of the victims of the tyranny of which he complained; but it is questionable if his doing so effected more than to turn Johnson's laughter into another and a wider channel.

But Goldsmith spoke feelingly. He was certainly one of the ablest writers of the day, but no pension was ever offered to him, though on every hand bounties were freely bestowed on the most indifferent and least deserving of authors—men whose names were forgotten before the end of the century, and during the lifetime of the men themselves remembered only by the pay clerk to the almoner.

Of course, the scheme for bringing the managers to their senses never reached a point of serious consideration; and forthwith Goldsmith began to illustrate, for the benefit of posterity, the depths to which the stupidity of the manager of a play-house can occasionally fall. The public have always had abundant proofs of the managers' stupidity afforded them in the form of the plays which they produce; but the history of the production of the most brilliant comedy of the eighteenth century is practically unique; for it is the history of the stupidity of a manager doing his best to bring about the failure of a play which he was producing at his own theatre. He had predicted the failure of the piece, and it must strike most people that the manager of a theatre who produces for a failure will be as successful in compassing his end as a jockey who rides for a fall. Colman believed that he was in the fortunate position of those prophets who had the realisation of their predictions in their own hands. He was mistaken in this particular case. Although he was justified on general principles in assuming his possession of this power, yet he had made no allowance for the freaks of genius. He was frustrated in his amiable designs by this incalculable force—this power which he had treated as a quantité négligeable. A man who has been accustomed all his life to count only on simple ability in the people about him, is, on suddenly being brought face to face with genius, like an astronomer who makes out his tables of a new object on the assumption that it is a fixed star, when all the time it is a comet, upsetting by its erratic course all his calculations, and demanding to be reckoned with from a standpoint that applies to itself alone.

The stars of Colman's theatrical firmament were such as might safely be counted on; but Goldsmith's genius was not of this order. The manager's stupidity lay in his blunt refusal to recognise a work of genius when it was brought to him by a man of genius.

It has been said that the central idea of the plot of She Stoops to Conquer was suggested by an incident that came under Goldsmith's notice before he left Ireland. However this may be, it cannot be denied that the playing of the practical joke of Tony Lumpkin upon the two travellers is “very Irish.” It would take a respectable place in the list of practical jokes of the eighteenth century played in Ireland. In that island a collector of incidents for a comedy during the past two centuries would require to travel with a fat notebook—so would the collector of incidents for a tragedy. Goldsmith's task may not have been to invent the central idea, but to accomplish the much more difficult duty of making that incident seem plausible, surrounding it with convincing scenery and working it out by the aid of the only characters by which it could be worked out with a semblance of being natural. This was a task which genius only could fulfil. The room whose walls bore ample testimony to its occupant's sense of the comedy of a writer's life, witnessed the supreme achievement in the “animated nature” of She Stoops to Conquer. It contains the two chief essentials to a true comedy—animation and nature.

It is certain that the play was constructed and written by Goldsmith without an adviser. He was possibly shrewd enough to know that if he were to take counsel with any of his friends—Garrick, Johnson, Reynolds, or Colman—he would not be able to write the play which he had a mind to write. The artificial comedy had a vogue that year, and though it may have been laughed at in private by people of judgment, yet few of those within the literary circle of which Johnson was the acknowledged centre, would have had the courage to advise a poet writing a piece in hopes of making some money, to start upon a plot as farcical as Nature herself. At that period of elegance in art everything that was natural was pronounced vulgar. Shakespeare himself had to be made artificial before he could be played by Garrick. Goldsmith must have known that his play would be called vulgar, and that its chances of being accepted and produced by either of the managers in London would be doubtful; but, all the same, he wrote the piece in accordance with his own personal views, and many a time during the next two years he must have felt that he was a fool for doing so.

However this may be, the play was finished some time in the summer of 1771; and on September 7th the author was back at his rooms in the Temple and writing to his friend Bennet Langton, whom he had promised to visit at his place in Lincolnshire. “I have been almost wholly in the country at a farmer's house, quite alone, trying to write a comedy. It is now finished, but when or how it will be acted, or whether it will be acted at all, are questions I cannot resolve,” he told Langton.



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The misgivings which he had at this time were well founded. He considered that the fact of his having obtained from Colman a promise to read any play that he might write constituted an obligation on his part to submit this piece to Colman rather than to Garrick. He accordingly placed it in Colman's hands; but it is impossible to say if the work of elaborate revision which Goldsmith began in the spring of 1772 was due to the comments made by this manager on the first draft or to the author's reconsideration of his work as a whole. But the amended version was certainly in Colman's hands in the summer of this year (1772). The likelihood is that Colman would have refused point-blank to have anything to do with the comedy after he had read the first draft had it not been that just at this time Goldsmith's reputation was increased to a remarkable extent by the publication of his Histories. It would be difficult to believe how this could be, but, as usual, we are indebted to Mr. Boswell for what information we have on this point. Boswell had been for some time out of London, and on returning he expressed his amazement at the celebrity which Goldsmith had attained. “Sir,” he cried to Johnson, “Goldsmith has acquired more fame than all the officers last war who were not generals!”

“Why, sir,” said Johnson, “you will find ten thousand fit to do what they did before you find one who does what Goldsmith has done”—a bit of dialogue that reminds one of the reply of the avaricious prima donna when the Emperor refused to accede to her terms on the plea that were he to pay her her price she would be receiving more than any of his marshals. “Eh bien, mon sire. Let your marshals sing to you.”

At any rate, Colman got the play—and kept it. He would give the author no straightforward opinion as to its prospects in his hands. He refused to say when he would produce it—nay, he declined to promise that he would produce it at all. Goldsmith was thus left in torment for month after month, and the effect of the treatment that he received was to bring on an illness, and the effect of his illness was to sink him to a depth of despondency that even Goldsmith had never before sounded. The story told by Cooke of his coming upon the unhappy man in a coffeehouse, and of the latter's attempt to give him some of the details of the plot of the comedy, speaks for itself. “I shook my head,” wrote Cooke, “and said that I was afraid the audience, under their then sentimental impressions, would think it too broad and farcical for comedy.” This was poor comfort for the author; but after a pause he shook the man by the hand, saying piteously: “I am much obliged to you, my dear friend, for the candour of your opinion, but it i............