Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Rising Village’’by Kenneth J. Hughes I The best available criticism of Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Rising Village” is to be found in “The Goldsmiths and Their Villages,” an article of 1951 by Desmond Pacey,1 and in the economical statement by Fred Cogswell in the Literary History of Canada.2 These works of criticism are not without their problems, however, for they fail to perceive both the functional significance of the Flora and Albert section of the poem and the implications of the removal of certain telling first edition passages from the second edition. These omissions and the over-emphasis on the elder Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” as model lead to other difficulties. Professor Pacey offers a comparative analysis of “The Rising Village” and its predecessor-model, “The Deserted Village,” by the Canadian poet’s Irish namesake and great-uncle. He notes the similarity of the general structure of each work and observes that the Canadian poem is 132 lines longer (p. 27). This extension he attributes to the addition of the Flora and Albert story to the Canadian poem, for which there is no equivalent in “The Deserted Village.” But that the structures of the two works are similar except for the Flora and Albert story surely suggests that the latter must be of some great since, for the Canadian Goldsmith must have had some compelling reason for departing from his model when he inserted the Flora and Albert story, as indeed he had. For Professor Pacey the Canadian poem is decidedly inferior to its Irish ancestor because it lacks the “Wit and passion” (p. 28) of that work. Indeed, he proceeds to say, “The Canadian Goldsmith . . . appears to have felt passionately about nothing: he neither hates nor loves with any of his uncle’s vehemence. The latter’s diatribes against luxury and the tyranny of wealth have . . . no counterpart in The Rising Village” (p. 29). The latter part of this statement is unquestionably true as any examination of the text will quickly verify. It by no means follows, however, that the alleged cause, the supposed lack of wit and passion, is characteristic of Goldsmith the man. Goldsmith undoubtedly knew what every eighteenth-century rhetorician knew, that an approach must generally be in some way acceptable to the audience for which a work is intended, and therefore a literary art object is by no means necessarily a measure of the passion an individual writer actually brings to a particular subject. But there is a yet more compelling reason for the difference of emotional intensity between the two works and this is indicated by the titles themselves, “The Rising Village” and “The Deserted Village.” The Canadian work is a success story written from the point of view of the ruling oligarchy in Halifax; the elder Goldsmith’s poem is a story of failure by a member of the Tory class in Britain which is threatened by the rise of industrialism and new social forces. The Canadian looks on with satisfied pleasure (despite some problems), while the Irishman inveighs against the wretched developments in what is for him an increasingly vile world. His passions and invective — and wit — can be explained readily enough by the socio-economic developments that gave rise to them. Similarly, the Canadian Goldsmith’s position can be explained by the different situation in Nova Scotia. There is no point in bemoaning the absence of qualities in the one work which are present in the other because different conditions gave rise to each. Both works distort empirical facts to give birth to what each writer considered to be the essential truth. For the elder Goldsmith this took the form of an outraged pessimism, for the younger, a satisfied optimism. If the elder Goldsmith prematurely indicted socio-economic developments that led to rural depopulation, he nonetheless anticipated what was going to happen; and if the younger Goldsmith glosses over some of the problems in Nova Scotia (by no means all of them) in his optimistic portrait of the province, it still remains that Nova Scotia was a success story and his account of its rise is essentially correct. Another criticism by Professor Pacey of the Canadian poem is that it “falls short of the style of its model . . . in its relative lack of specific detail” (p. 34). Written in accordance with eighteenth-century conventions which emphasized the universal, the tulip rather than the stripes on the tulip, we would not expect an abundance of detail. Moreover, notwithstanding the similarity of structure between “The Rising Village” and “The Deserted Village,” the two works do not properly belong to the same genre. A little later Professor Pacey quotes a few lines from the poem:
Of these he remarks: “This last passage has the air of being written by rote: it is a bit of padding which adds nothing to our understanding of the village” (p. 31). There are two main problems here. First, far from being redundant, this passage is thoroughly functional in terms of the development of the poems and it is therefore not padding. The abstract and universal rather than concrete “new prospects,” “extends,” “sphere,” and “expand” constitute essential parts of a sequence of deliberate repetitions (sometimes incremental) to remind us of the constant expansion of Nova Scotia in the process of growth. Second, we are not primarily interested in this poem with any “understanding of the village” as such. The village, like the characters, is typical, and it is intended to represent all the rising villages in the colony, and thus it is intended to represent the whole of Nova Scotia. This is why we move from the first hut at the beginning of the poem to a fully developed Nova Scotia at the end. And it is precisely because the village is all the villages in a rising Nova Scotia that Goldsmith avoids detail and emphasizes universality through appropriate diction. Professor Pacey’s comparison of character types and his preference for the English schoolmaster in “The Deserted Village,” rather than the type in “The Rising Village,” is difficult to understand. He writes: “Both schoolmasters are types, but the English schoolmaster is much more of a recognizable person than his Canadian counterpart” (p. 34). The Canadian schoolmaster emerges, in fact, as a type generally in keeping with McCulloch’s schoolmaster in Stepsure Letters.3 Moreover, the Canadian Goldsmith has set himself a much more difficult task than his ancestor as he attempts to outline his Canadian schoolmaster, for not only does he deliberately echo the elder Goldsmith as he creates the antithesis of the English schoolmaster, but he proceeds to offer us a Canadian type as well. The point of these comments is not to set the scene for a claim that the Canadian Goldsmith is better than his ancestor. To do that would be to go to the other extreme of Professor Pacey’s position (as it was, that is, twenty years ago). The object is rather to suggest that the comparative approach is satisfactory up to a point, but beyond that point it prevents us from understanding the Canadian work in its own right. For while the Canadian Goldsmith consciously works in the tradition of his ancestors, he transforms that tradition in the light of Canadian needs. “The Rising Village” will not replace Paradise Lost in the aesthetic pecking order, but it still be further up the line than Professor Pacey was inclined to believe in 1951. Professor Cogswell makes three points about “The Rising Village” that need to be questioned and modified. First, he states that “When The Rising Village: A Poem appeared in London in 1825, Goldsmith became so disappointed by the invidious comparisons that English critics made with his great-uncle’s work that he lost all further interest in poetic composition. He did, however, re-issue the poem, along with a few occasional pieces, in a volume entitled The Rising Village, with Other Poems, published in Saint John, in 1834” (p. 120). In fact a good deal more than personal disappointment at the reception of his poem in London was involved. His poetical disappointment was matched by and concurrent with political disappointment, and this led to a shift in political consciousness so that from an ardent proponent of the mercantile imperial system Goldsmith became aware of, and probably a party to, an incipient Nova Scotia nationalism;4 evidence for these views can be found in an examination of the major differences between the 1825 and 1834 editions. Professor Cogswell’s second point is that the poem falls basically into three parts, and “Sandwiched between and bearing little organic relation to either part is the pathetic story of Flora and Albert” (p. 120). The argument here will be twofold: that an understanding of the function of the story of Flora and Albert is central to an understanding of “The Rising Village” and that the story is an integral part of the whole work. In certain respects it is like the story of Leonora in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, but instead of offering a parallel story within a main plot to enforce his moral as Fielding does, Goldsmith moves to allegory because he is dealing with politically dangerous material. Professor Cogswell’s third point is in reference to poetic technique: “In his skilful use of balance and antithesis, Goldsmith demonstrates how carefully he had studied his great-uncle’s work. Unfortunately, he borrowed tamely every conceivable trite phrase and hackneyed rhyme that had found its way into the eighteenth-century British couplet.” As a result, his otherwise respectable lines are studded with clichés” (p. 120). These judgements can only be modified by reference to poetry and politics, or rather what may be called the politics of poetry. In the absence of serious studies of the social basis in Britain for the relationship between the orderly couplet poetic form (why it was dominant and admired) and he generalized desire for order characteristic of the period, together with the prevalence of the admired and ubiquitous presence of antithesis, the answer to Professor Cogswell’s criticism can only be sketchy. Yet it can surely be no accident that the eighteenth century was the period which saw the consolidation in Britain for the first time of opposing political parties to create a union of opposites within the parliamentary framework. Nor can it be an accident that these parties were the expression in politics of a union of opposites in the economic sphere between a Tory landed class and Whig mercantile capitalists. If there was strict order and tension in the poetry, there was also strict order and tension in the daily political and economic life of the country. When Goldsmith wrote, this socio-economic and political balance had been destroyed in Britain by the rise of laissez-faire industrial capitalism, and in this process the hegemony of the couplet had been upset in poetry. But this had not yet happened in Canada. The society which Goldsmith describes is one in which the eighteenth-century British situation still obtains, for Nova Scotia was still controlled by landed and mercantile interests. It seems reasonable to suggest, therefore, that Goldsmith uses the couplet form because, with its balance and antithesis, it constitutes a poetical form appropriate to a society in which political power consists of a union of opposites in the alliance between landed Tory and mercantile Whig interests. That is to say, since order and tension were characteristic of his audience’s daily experience, the same qualities in the literature would lead his audience to accept works in the couplet form as reflections of what was real. If Goldsmith learned the technique of balance and antithesis in the couplet form from his great-uncle, it was because he found it a congenial form in the first place. If he found it to be congenial, it was because it was appropriate both to the structure of the Nova Scotia society about which he wrote (i.e., what his audience expected) and to the structure of his own mind. We might go further and suggest that if Goldsmith had been able to write his work in blank verse, he would have been unable to communicate with his Nova Scotian brethren. In other words, although there would have been a first edition in London, there would not have been a second Canadian edition. In the light of the somewhat sketchy considerations it seems reasonable to say that while Goldsmith learned from his great-uncle’s work — and that of others — he was not simply a slavish imitator; rather he was working in a tradition which was accepted and expected by the audience of his time in Nova Scotia. That his work was not a success in England in the first edition of 1825 can be explained by the socio-economic industrial revolution which had destroyed the eighteenth-century conditions which in turn had given rise to the heroic couplet. Professor Cogswell alleges that Goldsmith borrowed phrases from the eighteenth-century British couplet. To begin to put this allegation in its proper perspective we must refer to the doctrines of poetic diction and poetic kinds, although it must be observed that, in the absence of a fully annotated edition of “The Rising Village,” the case for extensive borrowing has not yet been proved. While there was no Academy along the lines of the French Academy in England in the eighteenth century, the rules for the writing of poetry were as well known as if there had been. Tillotson observes that the heroic couplet “became the most precise metre ever used in English verse”5 and “the ‘kinds’ of poetry were still seen as distinct, and as requiring the use of different kinds of diction” (p. 24). Berger argues that such academic rules “schematize and inhibit the artist’s imagination before he even begins to work.”6 Thus, eighteenth-century British poetic theory constitutes an a priori concept of poetry for Goldsmith; he knows in general what he will do before he does it. We can therefore expect a similarity between his diction and eighteenth-century British poetic diction. How many phrases are merely similar and how many literally borrowed we cannot know at the present time. But we do know that Goldsmith was limited in his choice of diction by the rules governing the kind of poetry he wrote. Tillotson remarks that, “When writing satire the eighteenth-century poet chose his words as freely as any poet.” The art, passion, and invective of the elder Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” seems to belong here. However, “when writing an epic pastoral, and georgic the eighteenth-century poet was not so free” (p. 28). “The Rising Village” seems to belong here. Goldsmith could not freely choose his diction because he was not writing satire; he was writing according to the rules. He was writing according to the rules because his subject (and audience) was a society with the same political and economic power structure and the same poetic expectations as obtained in Britain in the eighteenth century, out of which the poetic rules had sprung (or been adapted from the French). Goldsmith’s acceptance of the rules implies an acceptance of the political power structure, although his attitude is by no means unquestioning. The critics find “The Rising Village” to be beset with problems and these problems are said to be the cause of the work’s failure. However, if we approach the poem from a different angle, we shall be able to see that “The Rising Village,” in fact, is a coherent poetic structure in which the Flora and Albert story has a functional part. Moreover, we shall also be able to account for the major textual changes7 between the 1825 and 1834 editions, changes about which the critics are silent. The text employed here will be that of 1834 for the simple reason that it is the most Canadian of the two and the one most employed by critics. II “The Rising Village”8 seems to be a very simple poem at first glance. It starts with conventional invocations and moves on to a brief description of the mother country, England. From this point it offers an account of the history of the settlement of Nova Scotia and of the growth of the village of the title. We start with savage Indians, see nature gradually tamed and crops grow. We watch the appearance of the tavern, church, general store, and schoolhouse, together with the pedlar who turns merchant, the half-bred doctor, and the teacher. We are told of country sports and of the sad (and, as some think, silly and digressive) story of Flora and perfidious Albert which takes up about one fifth of the work. Albert, “noble, kind, and free,” meets “Flora on the green” in summer and offers “vows of love.” Winter having arrived, “the bridal dress was made” and all is set for the wedding. At this point Albert sends a letter saying that he cannot marry her and that he has gone away. With “her reason fled,” Flora dashes out into the setting sun and the cold snow where she collapses to be saved next morning by a poor “peasant” whose wife nurses Flora back to health. The poem closes with the now viable community that is Nova Scotia presented as a good child of mother Britain. The general effect of this superficial reading is that of a concatenation of vignettes that moves us across time. The poem opens with an address to the poet’s brother, Henry, the person to whom the dedicatory letter of the 1825 edition was also addressed:
Shortly afterwards the poet makes a direct connection between his poem and the “Deserted Village,” Auburn Village, by his great-uncle, the Irish Oliver Goldsmith. As he does so he introduces the idea of the decline of the old world and the rise of the new:
We shall see later that this contrast between the rising new world and the declining old one is of central importance to the theme of the poem as a whole. Following the introductory section we are presented with a capsule portrait of Great Britain:
The remarkable economy of this passage is explained by its abstract technique, and this technique is a reflection of the poet’s vision. Like God, Goldsmith sits on high and, from amidst the vast collection of empirical details and contradictions that constitutes a complex British society in a process of change, he selects what he believes to be essential features of that society. These he then proceeds to offer to his readers in generalized terms. The overall effect is one of collapsing a macrocosmic Britain to microcosmic and manageable proportions. The result is that we see Britain reduced almost to a village scale. As remarked, this essential portrait of Great Britain is the key to Goldsmith’s technique and vision in “The Rising Village.” For after this description he causes us to leap in space from Britain to Nova Scotia, and in time back fifty years:
Through this juxtaposition of Britain and Nova Scotia there is a deliberate contrast created between settled and civilized Britain and unsettled and uncivilized Nova Scotia (Goldsmith takes the common view of the time that Indians are savages). As we proceed through the poem and witness the development of the new land, we slowly see the essential outlines of a new Britain (i.e. Nova Scotia) emerge. While not all the details suggest Britain (e.g., the general store), the essence of the new land is British. What Goldsmith does, in fact, is to take his abstract account of Britain in the sixteen-line section and use it as a sort of a priori idea or concept which is presumably carried in the minds of the settlers. He then shows how the settlers imposed this idea or concept, through labour, on the new and alien land. Thus, if we discern a general similarity between Goldsmith’s account of Britain at the beginning of the poem and his subsequent description of the new land, this similarity is intentional. For him, the two countries are essentially the same, sharing as they do the same laws, values, and so forth. It is therefore no surprise to us when at the end of the poem we meet with a fully realized Nova Scotia standing side by side with Britain. What we learn is that Nova Scotia has reached maturity. The structural juxtaposition of Britain and Nova Scotia in separate verse stanzas at the conclusion of the poem helps to support this view. At the beginning of “The Rising Village” the idea of Britain is carried in the heads of immigrants. These settlers then impose the idea on the brute matter or untransformed nature which is Nova Scotia. And this is what the historical part of the poem is about: the transformation of untamed nature. It is thus easy to see that the village that rises in the title is first of all a village, but we soon learn that it is much more than a village. For just as Goldsmith chose to present us with an essential Britain reduced almost to a village scale in the sixteen line section, so does he present us with an essential village in the later part of the poem. “The Rising Village,” therefore, is both a particular village, the first of its kind, and simultaneously all the villages rising in Nova Scotia. It is, so to speak, an archetypal village. As a consequence, the rise of the village becomes the rise of Nova Scotia itself. Indeed, Goldsmith’s technique is consistent throughout in this respect, for he does not offer us a mass of empirical data so as to present a detailed picture of the specific experiences of settlers creating a particular village. Rather, he selects essential data so as to create a sense of the experience common to all the settlers and settlements without regard to specific distinguishing characteristics. This is true also of the characters that we meet. The pedlar who turns merchant, the half-bred doctor, and the teacher are all deliberately created types, particular variants of which could presumably be found in any rising village. The story of Flora and Albert might first be thought a weak link in the work, but once we understand the function that it serves on the simplest level of the poem, we shall see that this is not so. Preceding the Albert and Flora story in “The Rising Village” is an idealized and generalized picture of reality. In order to offset this idealization a flaw must be found, and we meet one in the story of Flora and Albert. It is interesting to note that flaw in Edenic Nova Scotia Goldsmith attributes to human weakness. Goldsmith, in fact, reduces all problems to the individual or private level (although there is a public, moral side also). The apologist for the Halifax Oligarchy thus admits that things may go wrong in this new land, but does not allow the possibility to rise in his readers’ minds that faults could be the results of defects in the political, social, and economic structure. The problems are individual, private, and moral rather than public and political. Indeed, the scene with poor deserted Flora lying exhausted in the snow is a deliberate ‘tear-jerker’ which seems to be designed for the readers who read only on the literal level. If we remember the socio-economic and political problems of the day, we will get the impression that Goldsmith deliberately avoids dealing with them. However, we shall see that there is more to the Flora and Albert story. It as precisely at this point in the narrative that it becomes possible to read “The Rising Village” on another level. For the hard-line Tory reader and for those who simply read on a literal level, Goldsmith offers a portrait of the best of all possible worlds. The basic political structure is sound and if there are problems, these simply arise out of the tendency of individual human nature to become perverted. Yet Goldsmith seems to have known that not all his readers would accept this rosy picture of society and this account of the origin of “evil”. Accordingly, he offers the possibility of an allegorical level of meaning. The fact that Goldsmith has Flora lying out all night in the snow tips us off that this story within a story is allegorical. We are not expected to believe that an unprotected person could survive a Canadian winter night. This allegorical level of meaning of the Flora and Albert story firmly places the blame for an, difficulties in Nova Scotian society in London.9 There are two mutually reinforced sides to the allegory. Flora is, of course, the goddess of flowers and we do not have to read too far before we realize that she appears here as the personification of nature and the whole fertility principle. This is surely very obvious when Flora appears at the height of summer and, as “Exhausted nature” (p. 10), sinks down in the winter snow when the sun (“The sun had set” — Albert? [p. 10]) has left her. What, however, is the significance of this nature myth to the poem as a whole? It is only when we move to the socio-economic and political sphere that it begins to make sense and the key is to be found in the name Albert. Had this poem been written after the courtship of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the name could easily be accounted for. We could ascribe its use to the general popularity of the name, although the political allegory would still be there. We would not be reasonably certain, however, hether the political allegory was there by accident or design. The name Albert is derived from “Old German Adalbert, compound of athal ‘noble’ and berhta ‘bright’, equivalent of Old English Aethelbeorht.10 Albert is first described in the following way in the poem:
That Albert is “foremost of the village train” and that he is “noble” suggests that, on the allegorical level, he is the embodiment of the English aristocratic ruling class when imperial-colonial relations were at their best. His perfiious desertion of Flora is thus the symbolic desertion of Nova Scotia by England in the developing period of economic stagnation following the economic boom of the Napoleonic Wars. The suggestion that the natural process of fertility has ceased to function points symbolically to the effects of British economic policy on the Nova Scotia economy and society. That Flora is rescued by a peasant implies that a sturdy and self-sufficient Nova Scotia can now go it alone without Britain if necessary.11 That the rescue is in a morning as the sun rises points symbolically to the new age that is being born. As a consequence of the allegory the last part of the poem points in two directions. Which one the reader perceived would depend upon the assumptions he brought to the poem. If he were a die-hard Tory, convinced that the old mercantile imperial connection of political dependence was a sine qua non for the continued existence of Nova Scotia, he would see in the last paragraphs of the poem a dutiful Nova Scotia standing beside Mother Britain. If, however, he belonged to the opposite party (including some Tories), he would see that the fully realized Nova Scotia could well exist politically independently of the neglectful mother country but within the new laissez faire imperial economic framework. It would be possible to deal in greater detail with these patterns, but perhaps sufficient has been said to make at least plausible the view that Goldsmith caters to the needs of the two main groupings in the society in which he lived, the groups that constituted the Halifax oligarchy. That he could treat his subject in this fashion indicates that he may not have been quite so single-mindedly committed to the Tory imperial position as the plot line might at first suggest. The possibility arises that he could have been a spokesman for a mercantile and Tory nationalist position. III There is evidence for the view that Goldsmith shifted from an imperialist to a nationalist position in the changes that were made between the 1825 and 1834 texts. In particular we must look at the twenty-line passage excised from the 1834 edition of the poem after Goldsmith’s disappointments in London. The passage reads as follows:
Like Albert in “The Rising Village,” by 1828 Dalhousie had gone and he had left unmoumed. Professor Gnarowski remarks that, “As far as the deleted portion of the poem was concerned, it had to do with Dalhousie and therefore could be considered to have been a reference which was slightly passé in 1834” (p. 15). Within the broader ideological context of the poem outlined above, however, the mere fact of Dalhousie’s departure would not be sufficient to account for the deletion of this passage. In the economical words of the Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature, Dalhousie was “An authoritarian who believed that it was his duty to uphold the rights and prerogatives of the mown against popular pressure.”13 Thus, Dalhousie was not hated qua individual but qua the upholder of certain repressive principles which he himself did not create. The difference, therefore, between the 1825 text and the 1834 text can be accounted for by a shift in Goldsmith’s political consciousness. Dalhousie was the same authoritarian in 1825 as he was in 1828 when he was forced to leave. He did not change but Goldsmith did. Goldsmith came to adopt a more nationalist position. Additional evidence seems to confirm this view, for it points to a Canadianization of the 1834 text. The evidence is worth quoting in full since Professor Gnarowski’s edition (a small edition) is no longer in print and is not widely available. First of all, the two final paragraphs of the 1825 dedicatory letter are deleted from the 1834 edition:
Secondly, two footnotes in the 1825 edition making glowing reference to the [British] Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts are removed:
And:
When we note that the S.P.G.F.P. was subsidized by the British government, the implications of this edition become more obvious. Finally, a footnote reference to the Earl of Dalhousie is also excised:
The cumulative effect of these changes is to Canadianize the text, thus revealing the rise of Nova Scotia as a Canadian success story without the aid of London, the S.P.G.F.P., His Majesty, or “those able men, who have been selected, by His Majesty.” We can only conclude from all this that there was a shift in political consciousness on the part of Goldsmith from that of a pillar of the imperial establishment to that of a nationalist restive under the yoke of London between the years 1825 and 1834. The poetical disappointment at the reception of his poem in London was therefore matched by a corresponding political disappointment with London. IV As previously remarked, “The Rising Village” is not, in fact, a particular village at all. It is a typical village that is used to suggest all the rising villages. It is, therefore, Nova Scotia itself. The movement in the poem is from the first settlement to a fully realized embodiment of the British idea which is Nova Scotia. And just as the village is a typical village, so are the figures that we meet types rather than specific individuals. They are types of characters who have all the essential characteristics of many particular individuals. Goldsmith deals, then, with the general rather than the particular. We shall see that this is also a characteristic of his style. The main technical device by means of which the poem develops is a simple but very effective one. It is that of a form of incremental repetition. The process begins in the sixteen-line description of Britain where Goldsmith introduces words and phrases which interweave like many different coloured strands throughout the work. These serve to reveal in progressive stages how Nova Scotia steadily takes on the characteristics of the mother country as the process of settlement and the transformation of nature continues until it is brought to a conclusion in the fully realized new entity. At the beginning of the British passage Goldsmith suggests the unity amidst variety that is the mother country:
That he is speaking of a geo-political entity becomes clear with the mixed catalogue that follows as we move from “prospects” to “merchants” and so forth. The circle represents the unity, and the many “scenes” from nature and society represent the diversity. In the very last lines of the poem he hopes for the future Nova Scotia that “bliss and peace encircle all they shore . . .” (p. 14). Bliss and peace are properly associated with the circle, for they suggest an absence of strife and the presence of harmony and up this point, Nova Scotia has taken on the essential characteristics mother country. One of the characteristics of Britain is its boundless and charming prospects:
Throughout the different stages of the description of Nova Scotia’s development this theme is repeated as the new land takes on the essential characteristics of the old:
There is an ambiguity in the first use of the word “prospects” in the Britain passage so that it means both a view of nature and human and material prospects. The word is used in both these senses with reference to Nova Scotia, as the examples above demonstrate. Noticeable also is the image of the “circling year” in the first of the four examples above and the “sphere” of the third. These fit into the pattern of circle images discussed briefly above. But
Goldsmith does not rely on simple assertive incremental repetition to obtain his effects.
Between the carefully scattered repetitions throughout the text he creates a sense of this
expansion of boundless space by using images of spreading and extension. Once the seeds of
civilization are set we find that “humble cottages are spread . . .” ( p.
4). And “The arts of culture now extend their sway . . .” (p. 4) (the
word “sway” is picked up from “regal sway” in the sixteen-line
passage). Again, the village churchyard “spreads a holy loom around . .
.” (p. 5). There is sport “Beneath some spreading tree’s expanded
In the sixteen-line description of Britain we find that “Autumn’s fruits their rich luxuriance yield” (p. 2) and the poem keeps returning to autumn and to the rich luxuriance. We shall concentrate on the latter here. In Nova Scotia, the peasant’s
The word “rising” also fits into a pattern as we see in the next example of rich luxuriance:
We find that
And again: “And all the land, luxuriant, rich, and gay . . .” (p. 13). There is the sense throughout this process of repetition that we move to newer and newer levels of luxuriant richness as nature is transformed and the development of Nova Scotia realized. Although the word “culture” does not appear in the sixteen-line section dealing with Britain, we are offered there all the specific ingredients of that term. Thus, with “culture” (in the earlier sense of the word) Goldsmith’s reverses his usual procedure, for he starts from the various aspects of the concept the early sixteen-line Britain section and then proceeds to use the name various ways as he shows the development of Nova Scotia. Early in the poem he writes’
As the dangers recede and the viability of the community is assured we find:
Towards the end of the poem
And:
These examples are but a few of the many strands that interweave throughout “The Rising Village” and help to create the vision of the development of the idea or concept which is Britain in this alien land. They all converge on the conclusion where we see that in Nova Scotia a New Britain has been realized. Given the limitations of space and the vastness of the subject, Goldsmith could not have written the poem at all if he had approached it from the direction of naturalism rather than that of realism. For, notwithstanding the title, the poem is not concerned with a specific rising village at all as we have seen. The rising village is at once all rising villages in this new land; it is the embryonic Nova Scotia itself which we see develop into full maturity in the poem. It is the first settlement and it is all the settlements that collectively constitute the geo-political entity known as Nova Scotia. Indeed, this is why Goldsmith deals in universal rather than particular terms. The description of the general store is so “real” that there is a tendency to view it at first as a clear example of naturalism:
Is it a one-story building or two? Large or small? Painted or unpainted? What colours are the items? None of these questions can be answered be cause what we have here is the quintessential store rather than a particular store. We have the universal essence of the store captured in brief compass by the same cataloguing effect that Pope uses when he “describes” Belinda’s dressing table in “The Rape of the Lock.” To this is added the simple but effective technique of referring to “Here” and “There.” To have attempted a naturalistic description of the country store would have taken the space of “The Rising Village” itself and the result would not have been as effective. For what Goldsmith creates through this realist approach is a country store that is larger than life. If we look upon the general-store passage as one example of Goldsmith’s technical powers, we can readily That there is no evidence of any technical weakness. Indeed, this passage adds to the texture of the poem, and “The Rising Village” is above all a poem of texture. Another example of this creating of texture appears when Goldsmith moves from his sixteen-line description of Britain to the impact of the wild new land on the settlers. We find that these men “braved the perils of the stormy seas . . .” (p. 3). In the next thirteen lines we meet the following words: sadly, anguish, wild despair, dire distress, bleak, desert, pain, danger, toil, rude, lonely, wilderness, sinks, deep solitudes, solemn silence, waste, horror, gloomy shades. Goldsmith wishes to create a sense of this mental state for a diverse collection of readers, some of whom had been through the original experience and some of whom had not. His solution is to use a sort of shot-gun technique; he fires off a blast of abstract words which shoot out in the same general direction, and he does so with the sure knowledge that individual readers, regardless of their individual experiences, will be made to undergo the same general experience. It might appear at first that Goldsmith is working with an old and out-moded poetic form when he employs the eighteenth-century couplet rather than the blank verse of a Wordsworth. Such a view, however, is misleading. It fails to allow that verse forms operate in a necessary relationship with particular cultures at particular times as was suggested earlier. Similarly, it fails to allow that the state of development often differs between one land and another. Goldsmith aims to show that Nova Scotia is now civilized like Britain, by which he means quite literally that it has been made civil. Men have imposed their vision and labour on brute nature and transformed it, which is to say that they have brought it out of a primitive state under their control. Moreover, the control is too new to be taken for granted. Since the couplet form itself is a superb example of this control, it is thus an appropriate vehicle for developing the essential portrait of a realized Nova Scotia. But Goldsmith does not blindly borrow the couplet form from eighteenth-century England; he takes it because it is the best verse instrument in English for his purposes. Tillotson tells us that Dryden and Pope “are interested in nature as it is controlled by man,” not in nature as an objective, external thing in itself. Furthermore, “They superimposed on nature what they considered at certain times to be desirable. . . . This is what all poets do. Dryden, Pope and the rest differ only in what they superimpose and in what they select. They superimposed on nature some of their own humanity” (p. 17). This, of course, is imprecisely what Goldsmith does. And while “These poets wrote their best poetry with man as theme,” Goldsmith differs only in that he sees society as the theme. These poets “stood at the human centre, and saw the horizon and the sky in the sort of way that Ptolemy saw the universe. Man was the centre, however wide the circle described by his stretched compass” (p. 13). Goldsmith saw society at the centre, although it was a society filtered through mercantile and Tory oligarchic eyes. A careful scrutiny of the verse techniques in “The Rising Village” and the precise difference between them and eighteenth-century English practice will require a special study. It should be obvious by now, however, that the charge of technical weakness that has been levelled at this work is with out foundation and can only have arisen out of a misunderstanding of the poem. Similarly, it should now be clear that Goldsmith was not simple-mindedly imitating his great-uncle.15 The poem and the poet have surely lived too long in the shade of the earlier poet and poem. It is time for the poem to stand by itself for it is most assuredly capable of doing so. Notes
|