The Secret of Oliver Goldsmith by Munro MacLennan (review)

HUMANITIES 399 tious Student in III Health' (1830), and are redirected in a note to Blake Records, pp 401--':'2. If the reader perseveres he will find in Blake Records, p 402, n3, the original 1862 reference which Bentley does not reprint. Indeed, he quotes Lytton's 1830 statement as if made in 1862. Surprisingly few errors, however, have crept in - the Literacy [sic] Gazette (p 165); incorrect page references to Cunningham, Lives of ... British Painters, first edition - and the editing is otherwise impeccable. What is new about this volume is a stimulating final section of fortynine pages on the 'forgotten years,' 1831-62. This supplements the work of Suzanne Hoover and Deborah Dorfman and, with them, Bentley has rendered obsolete the view that Blake's limited contemporary reputation died with him. Blake Records cast much-needed light upon the obscure facts of Blake's life; this new volume will concentrate further attention upon his early posthumous reputation. It is particularly useful to have Garth Wilkinson's Preface to his edition of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1839); to see the continued efforts of friends like Henry Crabb Robinson and John Linnell to make known Blake's work; to be able to trace the pernicious influence of Cunningham's Lives of ... British Painters (1830); and to have the tantalizing Ruskin passage, subsequently omitted from Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), elevating Blake and Turner as the 'two magnificent and mighty' geniuses of the century. By 1862, however, Samuel Palmer could rightly talk of 'the Blake Revival' (p 261) and Blake's long haul to the status of classic had begun in earnest. (BRIAN JOHN) Munro MacLennan, The Secret of Oliver Goldsmith. New York: Vantage Press 1975, x, 169, $5·95 At the age of about twenty, the young Goldsmith presented himself to Bishop Synge of Elphin to be examined for Orders; the bishop rejected him. One of the several conjectural anecdotes surrounding the incident is that Goldsmith was rejected because he appeared before the bishop in scarlet breeches. Mr MacLennan explains that on reading the story of the scarlet breeches the present writer was struck by its similarity to an anecdote he had read many years previously in an article on color blindness in Chambers' Journal. It was there related that an English parson scandalized his congregation by appearing at the morning service in a scarlet foxhunting jacket, and was amazed at the objections raised to what he thought was a proper garment of clerical black. The suggestion that Goldsmith was color-blind and that he really thought himself suitably attired for his interview with the bishop, immediately presented itself as a much more logical explanation than any other that had been offered. Mr MacLennan has written The Secret of Oliver Goldsmith to test his 400 LETTERS IN CANADA hypothesis. His study consists of a brief summary of medical knowledge about colour-blindness followed by an exhaustive survey of colour refer' ences in the writings of and about Goldsmith. Because colour-blindness was virtually unknown as a medical phenomenon before the chemist Dalton described his own condition in 1794, 'Goldsmith's color blindness (if it existed) was never directly mentioned in his writings or those of his contemporaries.' Mr MacLennan's study produces primarily negative evidence; he finds the few references to colour in Goldsmith's work conventional, derivative, or occasionally incorrect. (References to colour are not more frequent in Gray or Johnson.) A 'positive answer' appears in a passage in Letter 44 of The Citizen of the World: 'If I find pleasure in dancing, how ridiculous would it be in me to prescribe such an amusement for the entertainment of a cripple! - should he, on the other hand, place his chief delight in painting, yet would he be absurd in recommending the same relish to one who had lost the power of distinguishing colours.' Only a person with first-hand experience, Mr MacLennan argues , could know of colour-defective vision. He proceeds to speculate on the effects of Goldsmith's secret concluding that 'Goldsmith's career would have been entirely different if his color vision had been normal.' MacLennan's is not a scholarly book. He uses an...