Reason Sweet and Sour By JOHN HOLLOWAY fi eld-sports and clubs,

deism and gardening, I field-sports and the Grand Tour—how many

still see the eighteenth century through the rosy spectacles of Leslie Stephen? This is no issue for the historian alone. The 'Age of Reason' brought to the light of day our own Age of Iron; and in giving birth to modernity it paid a stiff price. About where the price was paid,.there was a virtual conspiracy of silence. Payment was not exacted at the 'Tea Tables and Coffee- Houses' where Mr Spectator tells us he brought Philosophy to dwell, where Pope could re-assure his readers that nothing went on worse than the Rape of a Lock, where Chesterfield could tell his booby son to sacrifice daily to the Graces.

As is usual (or perhaps tautological) society paid the price at its periphery. No ravished lock was the issue in the hideous brothel scenes 'Mom which Stephen wished to avert his gaze) in Clarissa. Defoe also knew the social periphery. Rogues in high life, or in low, were much the same to him, but he saw the natural link between roguery and destitution (in Colonel Jack, the homeless beggar-boy pickpockets sleep in the warm ashes at a glass-works), and that between destitution and hopeless ignorance: 'I looked on picking pockets as a trade, and thought I was to go apprentice to it.'

The eighteenth century had no Mayhew, no Engels, no Booth. It left its poor well alone. Fielding wrote Amelia `to expose some of the most glaring evils which at present infest the country'; but along with the horrors of the debtors' prison, it throws in cupidinous book- sellers, running after other people's wives, getting drunk, and translating from the classics when you can't distinguish Lucan and Lucian. The book is really absurd. Thomson and Gray lament the sufferings of the rural poor, but see nothing lost in doing so through elegant variation of a cliché from Lucretius; the wretched phrase turned up again when Collins wrote about the Hebrideans, and yet again in Goldsmith's Traveller. Crabbe began by showing the bare facts: as the years passed, he came to prefer moralising.

Wesley's Journals show them sometimes too: `I preached on a smooth part of the fell . . . twenty or thirty children ran round us. They could not properly be said to be either clothed or naked, and they looked as if they would have swallowed me up.' This was in the North of England. Further from the centre lay the planta- tions, and the slavery, slaving and piracy that went with them. One can glimpse it in( the fiendish executions in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, written before the century begins, or in Defoe's Captain Singleton, or down to Crevecoeur, who takes a short cut going out to dinner, and finds a rebel slave, caged in the trees of a New England forest, to die of thirst and vulture- slashes: his eyes are out, but he can still ask for poison.

Another, less spectacularly victimised part of the periphery was one that Goldsmith himself knew—the Gaelic west : and there was also the

Gaelic north. Swift's irony (though he was him- self wholly Anglo-Irish) had got hold of the former : 'Seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt

. . a Child will make two Dishes at an Enter- tainment for Friends. This food will be . . . very proper for the Landlords, who as they have already devoured most of the Parents seem to have the best Title to the Children.' Later in the century, works like Young's Tour in Ireland (when he is not marvelling at the great houses) or the Memoirs of Arthur O'Neill the blind harper, show something of what the polite literature kept out of view.

For the north, Collins's Western Highlander 'drowned by the Kaelpie's wrath' was another polite, or if one prefers, ruthless fiction. No sea- monster need be invoked. That almost unobtain- able book, Donald M'Leod's Gloomy Memories (later substantiated, point by point, at the Royal Commission of 1883) deals with the early nine- teenth century; but it shows the culmination of something that went back to Culloden (of which George II got the first news among the lights of Drury Lane) and indeed before. 'That unfortu- nate country was made another Moscow,' M'Leod wrote, 'a dense cloud of smoke covered the whole country by day . . . at night I myself ascended a height and counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses. The clergy in their sermons main- tained that the whole was a merciful interposition of Providence to bring [the people] to repentance, rather than send them all to Hell, as they so richly deserved.'

So much for the Age of Sweet Reason : it leaves a sour aftertaste. Of that sour side, there is reason to think that Goldsmith knew as much as anyone. The Vicar of Wakefield, fantasy as much of it is, has roots deep in the author's life. The early chapters make a picture of his father's family in rural Ireland, the picaresque middle section re-lives his own years of feckless youth and aimless vagrancy. As the story reaches its climax, the evil side of the age shows its colours: slavery, the plantations, eviction, house- burning, abduction, forced marriage, imprison- ment for debt, the gentleman sending his servants to club the plain man who offends him (one thinks of Dryden, of Voltaire)—this invites at least a moment's comparison, in its transient vision of the great system whereby the strong and evil, once and for all, control the weak and good, with Candide or L'ingenu. But it is only for a moment. Then all comes miraculously right, and we are back with sentimental comedy in the manner of the eighteenth-century theatre.

In his plays, of course, Goldsmith improved on that theatre: he partly recovered the sharper and wittier tradition in abeyance since Congreve. Did his Irishness make this possible? Certainly, his two comedies have much more of Ireland than has been seen. Among the many little- known shorter pieces which it is one merit of this editions to reprint, is the Description of the Manners of the Native Irish. Here Goldsmith describes the Protestant Irish ('affable, foolishly prodigal, hospitable, and not to be depended upon') and says they got like that through contact with the native Irish 'who carry all these faults to a vicious extreme.' The passage amounts to a sketch of the 'Good Natur'd Man' before he becomes 'prudently generous, and sincere'— works his passage, that is, as Goldsmith's Englishman.

In She Stoops to Conquer. English polite society seems, through a muddle, to turn into a

quasi-Irish world, such as one may read of in a work like Callwell's Old Irish Life. The country house is as roystering as the country inn, the gentleman's daughter much like the chamber- maid, geniality is everywhere but wholly without finesse. one passes the time in drinking, hospi- tality, singing, driving over bad roads, and losing one's way. No doubt all this happened in England too. But Tony Lumpkin's drinking song is no English ditty : with its dog-Latin and classical deities, it is a comic piece by an Irish hedge-poet. If The Good Natur'd Man mytholo- gised Goldsmith's escape from Ireland to England —no wonder he described the 'Native Irish' in what he called 'A letter from an English Gentleman'—She Stoops to Conquer covertly indulges in an imagined reversion to what he had 'escaped from.

Escaped he had. He was a successful man of letters, with the friendship of Johnson and Garrick, and presents of venison from the nobility. His poem The Traveller finds no fault in England graver than contentious faction, and the dominance of money values over literary and aristocratic ones. Ireland goes unmentioned. The Deserted Village is indeed the clearest outcry against oppression that we have from the middle of the century. Yet even here, Goldsmith seems to compromise. No one can really tell what the poem is about. It may spring from Irish evictions. It may be something in England, like what he records in The Revolution in Low Life, another telling piece which is now reprinted. It may be that its most moving lines, where the evicted peasants are emigrating: Downward they move, a melancholy band, Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand

loQk back to the first major eviction, that ineffectively hushed up in Skye in 1739. But the poem then collapses. Its harsh realities fade away, and it bids farewell not to the destitute, but the 'dear charming nymph' of poetry instead.

Goldsmith certainly had a dear charming style; and perhaps a style like that is done no harm by an inveterately second-rate mind. Set him against Johnson, and the case is clear. It was Johnson the life-long metropolitan who set out, in old age, for the Western Isles, to 'amplify [his] thoughts with new scenes of nature. and new modes of life'—modes of life just such as Goldsmith had known first hand, and then he turned his back.

Even in Johnson, the century had less than it needed. He, to be sure, saw the price that it paid for its culture; but he thought that price, in large terms, was intrinsic to the human lot, instead of part of a particular and eradicable phase in history. Seeing l'infiime, and clearly, he could not say with Voltaire (so much less than he in many ways), ecrasez l'infthne. Yet beside Johnson, even this substantial edition will not conceal the fact that Goldsmith is a pleasing featherweight.

• COLLE•CT1-D WORKS OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Edited by Arthur Friedman. Five vols. (O.U.P., 16 guineas.)