he was ever mixed up in any of the petty quarrels such as spot the lives of so many men of letters. Yet his amiability was due to no weakness of character or want of fixed opinions. The sure judgment of his own powers maintained in the face of a disheartening opposition, the uninterrupted faithfulness to his country during a long residence abroad in which he had every encouragement to forget that country, and finally the depth and sincerity of the attachment of his half-dozen personal friends to him-these are sufficient indications of strength and individuality of character.

His delicacy

of feeling.

The second main characteristic of the man was delicacy and refinement of feeling. Perhaps his was not a very profound or strenuous nature. He never cared to and refinement mix in politics or in the daily concerns of a business life; his sense of personal repugnance towards sordid details was stronger than his sense of the good to be accomplished through the use of such tools. This attitude towards the things of daily life is not, to be sure, very unusual, nor is it generally to be commended. The justification of it in Irving is to be found in a real and not an affected delicacy of nature. Irving's temperament was that of a poet -a poet of a tender and somewhat sentimental cast of imagination. The characteristic of his work is always beauty rather than power. However much he may have felt in his heart the deeper mysteries of existence, in open life he preferred the play of gentler feelings and emotions.

As a corrective to what might otherwise have proved a cloying sweetness of nature, Irving was possessed of a third

His sense of humor.

main characteristic-an unfailing sense of the humorous and whimsical in life. The world was not tragic to him; neither was it entirely. happy. It was a place of mixed good and evil where one could rejoice at the good, sorrow at the evil, it is true, but

forget it chiefly, in the distractions which a kind fate has put

at our disposal.

Date of the
Biography.

II. IRVING'S LIFE OF GOLDSMITH

The life of Goldsmith was the most rapidly composed of all Irving's writings. It was written during the summer months of the year 1849, at the time when Irving was occupied with seeing through the press the first collected edition of his works. Happening to be one day in his publisher's office, when the latter was looking over Forster's life of Goldsmith with the intention of reprinting it, Irving remarked that the subject was a favorite one with him, and that he had often thought of extending a sketch made some years before into a volume. At the solicitation of the publisher, Irving took up the task in earnest, and within two months the first sheets of the Biography were in the hands of the printers.

The method of

the Biography.

Of the various methods which a biographer may follow in the treatment of his subject, Irving chose one of the simplest. He did not attempt to reconstruct for us the whole life of the period of which Goldsmith was a part, to show the special conditions of race and environment which might explain the character of Goldsmith and his writings. This would be the method of the scientific or philosophic biographer. Neither is his method that of the scholarly biographer who devotes himself to the collection and orderly classification of all documents and traditions that may help to illuminate his subject. The lives of Goldsmith by Prior and Forster are written after this method, and upon them Irving depended almost entirely for his material. When asked whether he had introduced any anecdotes into his Biography which were not found in the above lives, he answered, No-he could not invent any new ones;

but that he had made more of the Jessamy Bride than the earlier biographers.

It was thus neither as the exact analyst of character nor as the special student that Irving set to work on his life of Goldsmith. His endeavor was a simpler one-merely to present a picture of the character of Goldsmith as that character appealed to his sympathies. He selected his details entirely from this point of view, and what seemed to him not significant or expressive of some trait of character in his subject, he omitted. There are consequently few dates in the book, few records of fact, and practically no discussion of Goldsmith's writings considered apart from the life of their author; nor is there any attempt to estimate the value of these writings or to fix Goldsmith's place in the history of literature. The work, indeed, may be described as Irving's personal estimate of the character of Goldsmith.

It is as an attempt at sympathetic character delineation, therefore, that the book should be considered, first of all. It gives us a distinct and expressive portrait, unobscured by the confusion which results from a too great abundance of detail. The result is especially successful because the subject was one that Irving was admirably fitted to treat. Goldsmith's temper was one that Irving was heartily in sympathy with; this sympathy he has recorded in the verses from Dante which conclude the preface to the Biography, though, even if we did not have these verses to guide us, Goldsmith's literary influence might be readily seen all through his work. They were indeed spiritual brothers; there is in both the same whimsical humor and kindly, gentle satire, the same poetic feeling always tinged with a shade of half-hidden pathos.

The personal point of view, however, which Irving takes in his treatment of Goldsmith gives the work somewhat the

1

character of a special plea; he rises to defend Goldsmith, to give the apology for his life. The necessity and point of such a defense is evident from the quoted criticisms of Boswell. But one naturally seeks to know what conclusions other students of Goldsmith's life have arrived at, to measure Irving's estimate by comparing it with the judgment of others. To assist the student in this attempt, a number of representative estimates of Goldsmith from the pen of competent critics have been collected and are presented in an appendix. After reading Irving's Biography the student is advised to take up this section of the book and see how far the opinions there expressed contradict, how far they bear out, Irving's treatment of the subject.

Goldsmith as a the period. For this

representative

purpose

Second after the study of the Biography as an effort at character appreciation, the story there presented may best be studied as that of a representative man of letters of the Biography man of letters offers plenty of material, concerning both Goldsmith and his contemporary fellow-craftsman, Johnson. A few words, however, of general character, may be of assistance to the student in determining the wider significance of the specific events there recorded.

of the eight

eenth century.

First of all, it should be kept in mind that the pursuit of letters is as definitely a profession as medicine or the law and that the study of the life of an author, aside, of course, from the critical examination of his works, is largely taken up with the study of the relations that exist between him and the public that he endeavors to reach. Goldsmith's relations with his fellow-men were almost entirely literary; for, though his early years were spent in the study of medicine, of which study his doctor's title seems to be a sort of recognition by courtesy, it was only as a man of

1 See below, Chapter XXXIX.

letters that he was of consequence in his own period, or is of interest to us to-day. The life of a man of letters in Goldsmith's period is of special interest to the student of literary history, for the period was a transitional one, and an understanding of the position of the author in the social and intellectual life of that day will help largely to an understanding of the whole history of the profession.

Literature as a profession.

Literature as a profession, a means of livelihood, has existed from the earliest times, from the time when the wandering minstrel sang the heroic deeds of his nation or tribe and received as reward meat and drink and the protection of some powerful chief, with occasionally, perhaps, a share in the plunder of the warriors. In later times, since literature has been recorded in writing and printing, the methods by which an author gained his living from his pen may be considered in three periods. The first of these we may call the period of patronage; the second, Goldsmith's period, the period of the publishers or the booksellers; and the third, the period of modern publishing, may be best described as a system of profit sharing. According to the modern method an author does not usually sell his book outright to the publisher, but receives his pay in the form of a fixed percentage on each copy sold. This is manifestly the fairest arrangement for all concerned; the ill-success of a book is visited equally upon the publisher and the author, just as unlookedfor good fortune is shared by them in proportion. It has taken, however, many generations of books and book-makers to arrive at this practical and equitable system of profit sharing, and Goldsmith's period is interesting as marking one of the chief steps in this evolution. Before describing, however, the methods of Goldsmith's day, it will be necessary to say a word concerning the period of patronage.