Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, on Absurdity)

“Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller: Or, a Prospect of Society (1764)

I can think of at least one shameless supporter of absurdity. I’m sure you can come up with multiple examples.

This Day in Irish History (Death of Oliver Goldsmith, ‘Sublime, Vivid, Versatile’ Writer)

 Apr. 4, 1774— Even friends of Oliver Goldsmith sometimes despaired of his follies, and on his deathbed—after the former medical student took a “fever powder” that only worsened his condition—he was asked by his attending physician whether his mind was at ease.

“No, it is not,” he answered simply.

Hopelessly improvident, despite churning out a near-endless stream of poems, plays, essays, and travel pieces, Goldsmith nevertheless won the affection and admiration of an influential London circle of writers, artists, and actors. In no small measure, the efforts of this grief-stricken group ensured that his best writing would survive amid all the hack journalism that want obliged him to pour out.

I first became aware of Goldsmith in the mid-1970s when watching a PBS broadcast of his rollicking farce She Stoops to Conquer, starting Juliet Mills, Tom Courtenay, Ralph Richardson, and Brian Cox.

That comedy, which made Goldsmith the toast of the London theater scene when it premiered the year before the playwright’s death, was, legend has it, the result of an incident in his own life that gave his friends no end of laughter: he was hoodwinked into believing that a private country home was a local inn, and did not discover the mistake until after he had ordered the head of the household about.

Gullibility may have been the least of his faults. “Eager to shine in company,” summarized New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson in 1960, “he made large, sweeping assertions that had no basis in fact and left other people dazed. In an age that took conversation seriously, he was a notorious rattlebrain.”

Taking careful notes of all of this was James Boswell, who, in his famous biography of Goldsmith’s friend Samuel Johnson, offered this unforgettable mini-portrait:

“His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman. Those who were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him; and once at the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London, when those who sat next him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, ‘Pshaw! I can do it better myself.’”

That improvidence I alluded to earlier? Much of it derived from Goldsmith’s drinking and gambling—a situation only worsened by his propensity to claim sums for his work that did not match his boasts.

The son of an Anglo-Irish rural Protestant clergyman, Goldsmith may well have felt the need to promote himself in an urban environment like London that was only beginning to warm to Irish transplants, and especially among accomplished friends like Johnson, actor David Kean, and painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Indifferent about his medical studies while attending Trinity in Dublin, he shortly began to cast aside any notions of maintaining his own practice.

In addition to She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith’s other most heavily read works are the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and the melancholic poem “The Deserted Village” (1770), which anticipated the Romantic Movement in its tribute to the pastoral mode—or, in this case, a pastoral setting destroyed by the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and by legislation enclosing fields that ended up pushing peasants into cities for survival. 

As I demonstrated in this blog post from last year, he also assailed the "man  of wealth and pride" just as the Industrial Revolution began in earnest in England.

But, as I discovered in researching this, Goldsmith was an accomplished essayist. Although Boswell saw signs of him having “studiously copied the manner of Johnson, though, indeed, upon a smaller scale,” he strove for a more casual writing style than the great man of letters. His notable essays include “A City Night-Piece” and “An Essay on the Theatre.”

In his preface to the 12-volume General History of the World From the Creation to the Present Time (1764), Goldsmith advocated for historians to write as clearly as possible:

“A plan of general history, rendered too extensive, deters us from a study that is, perhaps, of all others, the most useful, by rendering it too laborious; and instead of alluring our curiosity, excites our despair.”

After Goldsmith’s death, Samuel Johnson and some friends received permission to honor him in Westminster Abbey. Johnson’s verses (translated from Latin to English) pay tribute to his friend in this way:

“Of all the passions,
Whether smiles were to be moved or tears,
A powerful yet gentle master;
In genius, sublime, vivid, versatile,
In style, elevated, clear, elegant—
The love of companions,
The fidelity of friends,
And the veneration of readers,
Have by this monument honored the memory.”

Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, on ‘The Man of Wealth and Pride’)

“The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park’s extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds:
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth
Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth.”—Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and novelist Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), “The Deserted Village” (1770)

Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, on Crowds and Falsehood)

“But a compact that is false between two men is equally so between an hundred, or an hundred thousand; for as ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.”—Anglo-Irish novelist-poet-playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Quote of the Day (Oliver Goldsmith, for a Guy in 'Deep Mitt')

“Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller (1764)

The top strategist for Mitt Romney, Stuart Stevens, has copped to trying steroids to see what they were all about. Perhaps his candidate wanted something like the same feeling of strength and rush without actually taking the performance-enhancing drug, because earlier this year—now known in a video that’s gone insanely viral--he went before a bunch of Florida fat cats—his people—to talk about the other guy’s people: the now-infamous 47 percent.

Mitt Romney was so in the moment that he dropped his mask and became hyperaggressive: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

For years, Romney and his advisers have thought obsessively about one number—270—the amount of Electoral College votes they’ll need to win. From now on, they may be thinking of 47—the number that, bandied about to a friendly audience, might now prevent victory.

The reaction to the video was swift—and not just from the usual suspects. The candidate, a New York Daily News wag wrote in a headline, was “In Deep Mitt,” or in “A Mitt Storm.” Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and Ronald Reagan speechwriter, opined that it was finally time to recognize that the Romney campaign was incompetent. David Brooks, The New York Times’ token op-ed conservative, encapsulated it perfectly for a baby-boom generation who gloried in Gilligan’s Island reruns: the headline THURSTON HOWELL ROMNEY.

(Oh, yes—lost in the hullabaloo was Romney’s remark that it would have been beneficial to him if his father, who was born in a Mormon colony in Mexico, had actually been of Mexican descent. Many Hispanics are probably wishing now that the candidate had followed the same remedy—“self-deportation”—he had urged to solve the problem with undocumented aliens. If he doesn’t want to self-deport, I’m sure they’ll be happy to lend him a hand, for free—even if, by his own definition, that would make him a “victim.”)

There are all kinds of reasons why the reactions to Romney’s remarks have proven so toxic, but one has gone unnoticed and even unarticulated, except for the 18^th-century writer Oliver Goldsmith, anticipating events by more than two centuries in the quote above: i.e., so many people already sense that governmental laws and regulations are tilted outrageously in favor of the 1%--Romney’s natural habitat. Put another way: Romney’s rank hypocrisy galls as much as his blithe condescension.

I’m not talking about the tax shelters that so many at Romney’s fundraiser in Florida surely enjoy. Nor am I talking about the disproportionate influence that their money gets the well-heeled in Washington as well as state capitals all across the nation. Nor am I talking about the host of the event, Marc Leder, who, as co-CEO of the private-equity firm Sun Capital Partners, according to the blogger Legal Schnauzer, “does exactly what Mitt Romney did years ago at Bain Capital”: i.e., revive some companies, dismantle quite a few.

No, I mean how the candidate himself has benefited, personally and professionally, from a different form of the entrenched privilege he criticizes:

*His wealthy father was able to keep him in college during the late 1960s, when Mitt received draft deferments for religious-service and academic reasons that allowed him to stay out of Vietnam—this at a time when many of the “47%” had no such options;

* His reputation as the managerial wizard who saved the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics was secured with the help of $1.5 billion supplied by the federal government—much of which was, as noted in the blog Democurmudgeon, given over to wealthy donors to the games;

* Without a massive bailout from banks and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Bain & Co., the firm that launched Romney on his career as a vulture—sorry, venture—capitalist, would have gone under. Even more outrageous, as outlined by a Tim Dickinson article in the September 13 issue of Rolling Stone, he threatened to distribute bonuses to executives at the financially troubled firm unless Bain were allowed to pay off its debt at a deep discount.

Right now, Democrats might have only one cause for complaint with the Almighty on the Romney gaffe: Why couldn’t it have occurred closer to Election Day? Such was the fate of an earlier Republican with a well-deserved reputation as a stiff, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. In the final days of his whistle-stop campaign, on a train with the premature title of Victory Special,” the locomotive gave a sudden lurch. “What’s the matter with that idiot engineer?” Dewey barked. That comment aroused the ire of the labor movement, who came out in big numbers to help Truman beat Dewey.