Doug, thanks for that post / excerpt from Raymond Williams. I've wanted to
learn more of the context of Goldsmith's work. I know Goldsmith wrote more
about the environment, an essay perhaps, but have lost the cite. Now I'm
energized to locate that.
Gene
>Eugene P. Coyle wrote:
>
>>One of the earliest environmental pieces is by Oliver Goldsmith about the
>>expropriation of another commons:
>>
>>from The Deserted Village
>
>Raymond Williams says of this in The Country & the City:
>
>If it is only the social history of the village that is in question, this
>simultaneous eviction of poetry is undeniably curious. But what happens is
>that from the intense personal situation, in which the independence of the
>poet is insufficient to maintain his life, and in which all the humanity he
>claims to represent is crushed and driven out by the coarse and unfeeling
>order of the new rich, a landscape extends, which is that of the village
>suffering a similar ignominy. The rural dispossession is, as we have seen,
>incisively observed. Its
>facts are present, palpably, in their own right. Yet the dispossession is
>subject, also, to another process; what I have called elsewhere, in
>relation to Gissing and Orwell, a negative identification. That is to say,
>the exposure and suffering of the writer, in his own social situation, are
>identified with the facts of a social history that is beyond him. It is not
>that he cannot then see the real social history; he is often especially
>sensitive to it, as a present fact. But the identification between his own
>suffering and that of a social group beyond him is inevitably negative, in
>the end. The present is accurately and powerfully seen, but its real
>relations, to past and future, are inaccessible, because the governing
>development is that of the writer himself: a feeling about the past, an
>idea about the future, into which, by what is truly an intersection, an
>observed present is arranged. We need not doubt the warmth of Goldsmith's
>feelings about the men driven from their village: that connection is
>definite. The structure becomes ambiguous only when this shared feeling is
>extended to memory and imagination, for what takes over then, in language
>and idea, is a different pressure: the social history of the writer. Thus
>the nostalgic portraits of parson and schoolmaster are of men independent
>and honoured in their own place, supported by a whole way of living in
>which independence and community are actual. Against this selfdependent
>power, which is also that of the poet, the encroachment of wealth and
>fashion is fatal. Yet to be a poet is, ironically, to be a pastoral poet:
>the social condition of poetry-it is as far as Goldsmith gets-is the
>idealised pastoral economy. The destruction of one is, or is made to stand
>for, the destruction of the other. And then the village itself becomes a
>pastoral and a poetic mode: its expropriation is assigned to the general
>vices of wealth and luxury. Thus it is very significant that the old
>village was both happy and productive, while the new condition is both
>unhappy and unproductive-
>
> One only master grasps the whole domain,
> And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain,
> No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
> But choked with sedges, works its weedy way;
> Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
> The hollow sounding bittern guards its nest;
> Amidst thy desert walk the lapwing flies
> And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.
>
>It would indeed be easy if the social process were really that. But the
>actual history, in which the destruction of old social relations was
>accompanied by an increased use and fertility of the land, is overridden by
>the imaginative process in which, when the pastoral order is destroyed,
>creation is 'stinted', the brook is 'choked', the cry of the bittern is
>'hollow', the lapwing's cries 'unvaried'. This creation of a 'desert'
>landscape is an imaginative rather than a social process; it is what the
>new order does to the poet, not to the land. The memory of'sweet Auburn' is
>of a kind of community, a kind of feeling, and a kind of verse, which are
>no longer able to survive, under the pressure of'trade's unfeeling train',
>but which equally cannot be gone beyond, into new relationship and
>imagination; which can only go into exile and a desperate protest, beyond
>history-
>
> Still let thy voice, prevailing over time,
> Redress the rigours of th' inclement clime.
>
>It is exiled poetry, at the end of The Deserted Village, which must teach,
>hopefully:
>
> That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
> As oceans sweep the labour'd mole away;
> While selfdependent power can time defy,
> As rocks resist the billows and the sky.
>
>Here, with unusual precision, what we can later call a Romantic structure
>of feeling-the assertion of nature against industry and of poetry against
>trade; the isolation of humanity and community into the idea of culture,
>against the real social pressures of the time - is projected. We can catch
>its echoes, exactly, in Blake, in Wordsworth, and in Shelley.
