Little Primrose dames of the
English classic, the wife and daughters of the Vicar
of Wakefield have no claim whatever to this name of
lady. It is given to them in this page because
Goldsmith himself gave it to them in the yet undepreciated
state of the word, and for the better reason that
he obviously intended them to be the equals of the
men to whom he marries them, those men being, with
all their faults, gentlemen. Goldsmith, in a
word, meant them to be ladies, of country breeding,
but certainly fit for membership of that large class
of various fortune within which the name makes a sufficient
equality.
He, their author, thought them sufficient.
Having amused himself ingeniously throughout the
story with their nameless vulgarities, he finally
hurries them into so much sentiment as may excuse the
convention of heroes in love. He plays with
their coarseness like a perfectly pleased and clever
showman, and then piously and happily shuts up his
couples — the gentle Dr. Primrose with his
abominable Deborah; the excellent Mr. Burchell with
the paltry Sophia; Olivia — but no, Olivia
is not so certainly happy ever after; she has a captured
husband ready for her in a state of ignominy, but
she has also a forgotten farmer somewhere in the background — the
unhappy man whom, with her father’s permission,
this sorry heroine had promised to marry in order that
his wooing might pluck forward the lagging suit of
the squire.
Olivia, then, plays her common trick
upon the harmless Williams, her father conniving,
with a provision that he urges with some demonstration
of virtue: she shall consent to make the farmer
happy if the proposal of the squire be not after all
forthcoming. But it is so evident her author
knew no better, that this matter may pass. It
involves a point of honour, of which no one — neither
the maker of the book nor anyone he made — is
aware. What is better worth considering is the
fact that Goldsmith was completely aware of the unredeemed
vulgarity of the ladies of the Idyll, and cheerfully
took it for granted as the thing to be expected from
the mother-in-law of a country gentleman and the daughters
of a scholar. The education of women had sunk
into a degradation never reached before, inasmuch
as it was degraded in relation to that of men.
It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose “could
read any English book without much spelling”
if her husband and son were as definitely limited
to journeyman’s field-labour as she was to the
pickling and the gooseberry wine. Any of those
industries is a better and more liberal business than
unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing.
Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too
indiscriminately of that century or of an unlettered
state. What is really unhandsome is the new,
slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century
had fallen.
That the mother of daughters and sons
should be fatuous, a village worldling, suspicious,
ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent, foul-mouthed,
pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almost
innocently natural, in Goldsmith’s story; the
squalid Mrs. Primrose is all this. He is still
able, through his Vicar, in the most charmingly humorous
passage in the book, to praise her for her “prudence,
economy, and obedience.” Her other, more
disgusting, characteristics give her husband an occasion
for rebuking her as “Woman!” This is done,
for example, when, despite her obedience, she refuses
to receive that unlucky schemer, her own daughter,
returned in ruins, without insulting her by the sallies
of a kitchen sarcasm.
She plots with her daughters the most
disastrous fortune hunt. She has given them
a teaching so effectual that the Vicar has no fear
lest the paltry Sophia should lose her heart to the
good, the sensible Burchell, who had saved her life;
for he has no fortune. Mrs. Primrose begins
grotesquely, with her tedious histories of the dishes
at dinner, and she ends upon the last page, anxious,
amid the general happiness, in regard to securing
the head of the table. Upon these feminine humours
the author sheds his Vicar’s indulgent smile.
What a smile for a self-respecting husband to be
pricked to smile! A householder would wince,
one would think, at having opportunity to bestow its
tolerance upon his cook.
Between these two housewifely appearances,
Mrs. Primrose potters through the book; plots — always
squalidly; talks the worst kinds of folly; takes the
lead, with a loud laugh, in insulting a former friend;
crushes her repentant daughter with reproaches that
show envy rather than indignation, and kisses that
daughter with congratulation upon hearing that she
had, unconsciously and unintentionally, contracted
a valid marriage (with a rogue); spoils and makes
common and unclean everything she touches; has but
two really gentle and tender moments all through the
story; and sets, once for all, the example in literature
of the woman we find thenceforth, in Thackeray, in
Douglas Jerrold, in Dickens, and un peu partout.
Hardly less unspiritual, in spite
of their conventional romance of youth and beauty,
are the daughters of the squalid one. The author,
in making them simple, has not abstained from making
them cunning. Their vanities are well enough,
but these women are not only vain, they are so envious
as to refuse admiration to a sister-in-law — one
who is their rival in no way except in so much as
she is a contemporary beauty. “Miss Arabella
Wilmot,” says the pious father and vicar, “was
allowed by all (except my two daughters) to be completely
pretty.”
They have been left by their father
in such brutal ignorance as to be instantly deceived
into laughing at bad manners in error for humour.
They have no pretty or sensitive instincts.
“The jests of the rich,” says the Vicar,
referring to his own young daughters as audience, “are
ever successful.” Olivia, when the squire
played off a dullish joke, “mistook it for humour.
She thought him, therefore, a very fine gentleman.”
The powders and patches for the country church, the
ride thither on Blackberry, in so strange a procession,
the face-wash, the dreams and omens, are all good
gentle comedy; we are completely convinced of the
tedium of Mrs. Primrose’s dreams, which she told
every morning. But there are other points of
comedy that ought not to precede an author’s
appeal to the kind of sentiment about to be touched
by the tragic scenes of The Vicar of Wakefield.
In odd sidling ways Goldsmith bethinks
himself to give his principal heroine a shadow of
the virtues he has not bestowed upon her. When
the unhappy Williams, above-mentioned, has been used
in vain by Olivia, and the squire has not declared
himself, and she is on the point of keeping her word
to Williams by marrying him, the Vicar creates a situation
out of it all that takes the reader roundly by surprise:
“I frequently applauded her resolution in preferring
happiness to ostentation.” The good Goldsmith!
Here is Olivia perfectly frank with her father as
to her exceedingly sincere preference for ostentation,
and as to her stratagem to try to obtain it at the
expense of honour and of neighbour Williams; her mind
is as well known to her father as her father’s
mind is known to Oliver Goldsmith, and as Oliver Goldsmith’s,
Dr. Primrose’s, and Olivia’s minds are
known to the reader. And in spite of all, your
Goldsmith and your Vicar turn you this phrase to your
very face. You hardly know which way to look;
it is so disconcerting.
Seeing that Olivia (with her chance-recovered
virtue) and Sophia may both be expected to grow into
the kind of matronhood represented by their mother,
it needs all the conditions of fiction to surround
the close of their love-affairs with the least semblance
of dignity. Nor, in fact, can it be said that
the final winning of Sophia is an incident that errs
by too much dignity. The scene is that in which
Burchell, revealed as Sir William Thornhill, feigns
to offer her in marriage to the good-natured rogue,
Jenkinson, fellow prisoner with her father, in order
that, on her indignant and distressed refusal, he may
surprise her agreeably by crying, “What?
Not have him? If that be the case, I think
I must have you myself.” Even for an avowedly
eccentric master of whims, this is playing with forbidden
ironies. True, he catches her to his breast
with ardour, and calls her “sensible.”
“Such sense and such heavenly beauty,”
finally exclaims the happy man. Let us make him
a present of the heavenly beauty. It is the
only thing not disproved, not dispraised, not disgraced,
by a candid study of the Ladies of the Idyll.