The Vicar of Wakefield

“ Fiction was as barren of scenery as poetry. None of the novelists were cognisant of the country scenes amid which their plots were laid, with the possible exception of Goldsmith. The Vicar of Wakefield has a rural setting, and there are references to the trees, the blackbirds, and the hayfields; but description is not introduced for the sake of its own beauty as in the novels of Charlotte Smith. ”

“ And then there are other qualities in this delightful Vicar of Wakefield than merely idyllic tenderness, and pathos, and sly humour. There is a firm presentation of the crimes and brutalities of the world. The pure light that shines within that domestic circle is all the brighter because of the black outer ring that is here and there indicated rather than described. How could we appreciate all the simplicities of the good man's household, but for the rogueries with which they are brought in contact? ”

“ Both in 'The Vicar of Wakefield' and in 'She Stoops to Conquer' characterization is mostly conventional, and events are very arbitrarily manipulated for the sake of the effects in rather free-and-easy disregard of all principles of motivation. But the kindly knowledge of the main forces in human nature, the unfailing sympathy, and the irrepressible conviction that happiness depends in the last analysis on the individual will and character make Goldsmith's writings, especially 'The Vicar,' delightful and refreshing. ”

“ The stay-at-home gratifies his wandering fancy by making little alterations in his too-familiar surroundings. Even the Vicar of Wakefield in the days of his placid prosperity would occasionally migrate from the blue bed to the brown. A life that had such vicissitudes could not be called uneventful. ”

“ Fiction developed in various directions. In The Vicar of Wakefield Goldsmith, in spite of his literary conservatism, portrayed manners and character with a perfectly natural grace, and with a delightful delicacy of touch. ”

“ Now Herder came, and together with his great knowledge brought many other aids, and the later publications besides. Among these he announced to us the Vicar of Wakefield as an excellent work, with the German translation of which he would make us acquainted by reading it aloud to us himself.
His method of reading was quite peculiar; whoever has heard him preach will be able to form a notion of it. He delivered everything, this romance included, in a serious and simple style, perfectly removed from all dramatically imitative representation ”

“ Some of his youthful attempts in literature have already been mentioned, and there is a dramatic sketch of his, founded on the Vicar of Wakefield, which from a date on the manuscript (1768) , appears to have been produced at a still earlier age, and when he was only in his seventeenth year. A scene of this piece will be sufficient to show how very soon his talent for lively dialogue displayed itself:—
"SCENE II. "THORNHILL and ARNOLD.
"Thornhill. Nay, prithee, Jack, no more of that if you love me. What, shall I stop short with the game in full view? ”

“ George Meredith, for instance, would probably lose by being transmuted into the passionate action of the stage, nor does M. Zola’s formule scientifique gain anything at all by theatrical presentation. With Goldsmith it is somewhat different. In The Vicar of Wakefield he seeks simply to please his readers, and desires not to prove a theory; he looks on life rather as a picture to be painted than as a problem to be solved; his aim is to create men and women more than to vivisect them; his dialogue is essentially dramatic, and his novel seems to pass naturally into the dramatic form. ”

“ We were next conducted to the church-yard, the Vicar having doffed his surplice, and assumed his usual habit, which partook of the dignity and taste of its wearer in a pleasing degree. His hat was specially ecclesiastical, and turned up at the sides, and over his cassock and bands he wore a clerical surtout, so that as he strode over the graves, in his small-clothes, displaying a finely proportioned leg, his entire figure might have been thought contemporary with that of his brother of Wakefield. ”

“ All. Vicar of Wakefield, first edition, ‘For.’
Man wants but little here below. Cf. Young’s Complaint, 1743, Night iv. 9, of which this and the next line are a recollection. According to Prior (Life, 1837, ii. 83) , they were printed as a quotation in the version of 1765. Young’s line is—
Man wants but Little; nor that Little, long.
modest. Vicar of Wakefield, first edition, ‘grateful.’
Far in a wilderness obscure. First version, and Vicar of Wakefield, first edition:—
Far shelter’d in a glade obscure
The modest mansion lay. ”

“ The boy's as downy as a boy need be.
In the year following the publication of "The Castle of Otranto," the "Vicar of Wakefield" was given to the world. It appears to have escaped travestie until 1885, when—thinking more, no doubt, of Mr. Wills's "Olivia" than of Goldsmith's chef d'œuvre—Messrs. Stephens and Yardley brought out at the Gaiety "The Vicar of Wideawakefield," in which Mr. Arthur Roberts and Miss Laura Linden sought, not unsuccessfully, to reproduce and heighten some of the artistic peculiarities of Mr. ”

“ My wife approved her suspicions very much, observing, that she was very apt to be suspicious herself; but referred her to all the neighbours for a character: but this our Peeress declined as unnecessary, alledging that her cousin Thornhill’s recommendation would be sufficient, and upon this we rested our petition.
CHAPTER XII. Fortune seems resolved to humble the family of Wakefield. Mortifications are often more painful than real calamities. ”

“ As it is, we doubt not that the experience of many of our Canadian coevals co [169] rresponds with our own. Whenever we read of the good Vicar of Wakefield, or of any similar personage; when in the biography of some distinguished man, a kind-hearted old clerical tutor comes upon the scene, or one moulded to be a college-fellow, or one that had actually been a college-fellow, carrying about with him, when down in the country the tastes and ideas of the academic cloister—it is the figure of Dr. Phillips that rises before the mental vision. ”

“ Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all
The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!"
But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is now delightful to find a snow-drop springing from this muck of the classics. In the year 1766 appeared Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. ”

“ Wakefield afterwards acknowledged that his opponent was ‘a man of talents, very superior in his education and advantages, and deserves the warmest commendations for the pains which he must have taken with the cultivation of his understanding in very untoward circumstances.’ On being appointed vicar of Belton, Leicestershire, in 1796, being then broken in health, he left Warrington, though he retained St. ”

“ I am informed it is Simon Alleyn or Allen who was vicar of Bray about 1540, and died, 1588.--Brome to Rawlins, June 14, 1735. (See Letters from the Bodleian, II. i. 100.)
196Vicar of Wakefield (The) , Dr. Primrose, a simple-minded, pious clergyman, with six children. He begins life with a good fortune, a handsome house, and wealthy friends, but is reduced to utter poverty without any fault of his own, and, being reduced like Job, like Job he is restored. First, he loses his fortune through the rascality of the merchant who held it. ”

“ The Trouble of the Barbed Wire.
XXXVIII.
So, ingloriously, ended the Angel's first and last appearance in Society. Vicar and Angel returned to the Vicarage; crestfallen black figures in the bright sunlight, going dejectedly. The Angel, deeply pained that the Vicar was pained. The Vicar, dishevelled and desperate, intercalating spasmodic remorse and apprehension with broken explanations of the Theory of Etiquette. "They do not understand," said the Vicar over and over again. "They will all be so very much aggrieved. ”

“ The rain was so plashing and streaming in rivulets among the mounds and stones of the burial ground of one of the most ancient and forgotten looking of such churches, when on a certain afternoon there came to the narrow soot-darkened Vicarage attached to it a tall, elderly man who wished to see and talk to the Vicar.
The Vicar in question was an old clergyman who had spent nearly fifty years in the silent, ecclesiastical-atmosphered small house. He was an unmarried man whose few relatives living in the far North of England were too poor and unenterprising to travel to London. ”

“ There is as much human nature in the character of the Vicar alone as would have furnished any fifty of the novels of that day, or of this. Who has not been charmed by his sly and quaint humour, by his moral dignity and simple vanities, even by the little secrets he reveals to us of his paternal rule. ”

“ The garments, indeed, made quite a terrestrial thing of him; the trousers were puckered transversely, and the shoes a size or so too large.
He was charmingly affable and quite ignorant of the most elementary facts of civilisation. Eating came without much difficulty, and the Vicar had an entertaining time teaching him how to take tea. "What a mess it is! What a dear grotesque ugly world you live in!" said the Angel. "Fancy stuffing things into your mouth! We use our mouths just to talk and sing with. Our world, you know, is almost incurably beautiful. ”

“ While at the Manor House all was bliss, life dawdled on comfortably enough at the Vicarage, where the good, easy-tempered, hard-working Vicar had begun to be reconciled to the idea that his only son was to be an idler all his life ”

“ On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage people, and next to them came those ambiguous beings who are neither quality nor subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a place by themselves in the typical English scheme; nothing is more remarkable than the progress the Church has made—socially—in the last two hundred years. In the early eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the house-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or any not too morally discredited discard. ”

“ The tying up for life of two people seemed immeasurably more awful to the Vicar than it does to the world in general, for he reckoned with things to whose existence little attention is paid. The power of two characters to raise or lower each other, was in his eyes a more real thing than the power of two purses to maintain the establishment that their owners’ friends expect of them. ”

“ The Vicar represses and reproves the violence of his enraged parishioners. The drawing is good; but it is not a subject we delight to look at; and we begin to fear that further on we shall fare worse. Why did not Mr Mulready give us the interview between the Vicar and his old acquaintance, Mr Jenkinson? Artists of skill like to show it in grouping, and prefer that to giving character. ”

“ Every one put on goloshes to climb or descend the hill to church. The Vicar and his wife came stepping over from the Vicarage close by like a pair of storks and when the bell stopped ringing it was as though another cloak of silence had been flung over Bridnorth village. ”

“ The dispersion and departure of the good Vicar's family was an additional misfortune that his parishioners had not looked for. The living, more valuable for its pleasant house and pretty glebe than for its revenue, was in the gift of one who through life had been, not in appearance or profession only, but in most true sincerity, the attached friend of the late incumbent; and Edward Wallace, his eldest son, was bred to the church with the express understanding that the next presentation should be his. ”

“ November was half over, yet here the only signs of autumn were the grey sky, and the crimson of the Virginia creeper.
The Vicar of Kettisford was one of those privileged persons who can speak with their enemies at the gate, assured of being backed up in their speech by a family contingent. The Vicarage seemed overflowing with young life, from the very threshold of the hall, where cricket-bats, a tricycle, a row of well-used tennis rackets, a stupendous array of hats, overcoats, and comforters, testified to that quiverful so esteemed in the patriarchal age. ”

“ The Vicar stood aghast, with his smoking gun in his hand. It was no bird at all, but a youth with an extremely beautiful face, clad in a robe of saffron and with iridescent wings, across whose pinions great waves of colour, flushes of purple and crimson, golden green and intense blue, pursued one another as he writhed in his agony. Never had the Vicar seen such gorgeous floods of colour, not stained glass windows, not the wings of butterflies, not even the glories of crystals seen between prisms, no colours on earth could compare with them. ”

“ The worthy Vicar, deserted by wife and child—beset by an intriguing woman—sinks down before his writing-desk and buries his face in his hands. After a few seconds of silent agony he rises, straightens himself—like a man determined to bear his burden with unbent back—and strides from the room. ”

“ And although we laugh at Moses and his gross of green spectacles, and the manner in which the Vicar's wife and daughter are imposed on by Miss Wilhelmina Skeggs and Lady Blarney, with their lords and ladies and their tributes to virtue, there is no laughter demanded of us when we find the simplicity and moral dignity of the Vicar meeting and beating the jeers and taunts of the abandoned wretches in the prison. ”

“ I have called off my imagination a few moments from the pleasures that surround me, to fix it upon objects that are still more pleasing, the dear little fire-side at home. My fancy draws that harmless groupe as listening to every line of this with great composure. I view those faces with delight which never felt the deforming hand of ambition or distress! But whatever your happiness may be at home, I am sure it will be some addition to it, to hear that I am perfectly pleased with my situation, and every way happy here. ”