This is the fourth and final of four parts revisiting Oliver Goldsmith’s  The Deserted Village which, with commentary from our Poetry Editor Ira Maine give insight on our social condition.

Goldsmith, friend of fellow Irishman, the statesman Edmond Burke, (the father of modern conservative politics) and  dinner companion to most of the London literati of the period; James Boswell and Dr Samuel Johnson who hardly need introduction. David Garrick, the greatest actor of his day, of whom it was said that his interpretation of the Bard was so intelligent that it was like watching Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.  The Irishman Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who owned the Drury Lane Theatre in London and wrote ‘The Rivals’ and ‘The School for Scandal’, plays which are still essential to a modern English education. Incidentally, people were aghast to discover Sheridan calmly drinking wine in Drury Lane as his much loved theatre burnt to the ground.

“Surely a man can take a glass of claret by his own fireside?’ he asked of his critics.

It was the influence of Sheridan amongst others which finally gained for Samuel Johnson a permanent pension of 300 pounds a year from George the Third.  Prior to this the great man had been confined to the debtor’s prison on at least two occasions.

Dr Johnson first launched his London dining and literary group ‘The Club’ in 1764 at the prompting of the major English painter,  Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the Royal Academy.   Before it was wound up, long after Johnson’s death Johnson’s ‘Club’ had numbered amongst its members Edward Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) Joseph Banks of Darwin and the Beagle, and Charles James Fox, one of the most influential Whig politicians of the period.

What companions Goldsmith had! How splendid their dinner tables must have been! Still, it is a very well established fact that if you put half-a-dozen bright Irishmen together, or even two or three… or just one…

Incidentally (and I have this on good authority) the dinner table was provided by yet another Irishman, Henry, the Duke of Rathcoole (west of Dublin) at de Burgh House in the Strand, and presided over by his step daughter, the renowned beauty, the Lady Juanita Gilles-Beaux,who, fluent in both Gaelic and French, was a not inconsiderable poet herself. Her portrait, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

But enough of this frivolity.

Now that the horror of enclosure has happened, the familiar made desolate, even Auburn’s pub;  ‘… Where nut brown draughts inspired, 

And grey beard mirth and smiling toil retired…’ is no more.

The school,‘Where many a time he triumphed…’ has ceased to exist.  The church, houses, barns, stables, the forge, all that went to make up the rhythm and pace of Auburn’s country life has been levelled, razed, brushed aside and hidden, as if the magnitude of the sin committed were too great to bear the light of day.

Goldsmith addresses the ruined village;

‘…One only master grasps thy whole domain.
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.
No more the glassy brook reflects the day,
But, choked with sedges, works it’s weary way.
Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all.
And the long grass o’er tops the mouldering wall.
And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.

These vast new fabulously profitable farms grew wheat almost exclusively during the Napoleonic Wars.  Europe, devastated by its wars with the French could produce little food and looked to England to feed its troops.  Monoculture, as we all know, provides only briefly intense seasonal work.  This cropping, on a scale never seen before, was hugely profitable for the landholder but, to a peasantry denied access to their traditional lands and way of life, it was a death sentence.  This system, designed without regard for a centuries old way of life, was calculated to utterly break the spirit of the people.  It did precisely that.

Now Goldsmith addresses the country itself and informs its government that, by their actions they have sown the seeds of their own destruction;

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Princes, Lords may flourish or may fade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made.
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

Princes and Lords are ten a penny, not worth tuppence, and are easily bought with thirty pieces of silver.  Destroy your own peasantry however, and the spiritual coinage of the realm is utterly and irretrievably debased.

Famine, the result of denying the peasantry access to land, meant that millions of people literally starved to death throughout the British Isles in the slump following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. When relief in the way of grain arrived by ship from America, British authorities would not allow it to land because they thought it would cause the price of home grown grain to tumble. People went on starving to death. They called this abomination ‘Laissez Faire Capitalism’.

As he walks about the seashore, the poet observes the crowds on the strand, queueing to get on board emigrant ships.  Goldsmith is aware that he is observing the veins and arteries, the life blood of the British Isles being lost forever to the sea.  An entire way of life being contemptuously thrown on the mercies of the ocean.

‘…and thou, sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid;
Still first to fly when sensual joys invade,
Unfit to these degenerate times of shame
To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame.
Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe,
That found’st me poor at first, and keep’st me so;
Thou guide by which the noble arts excell,
Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well.

The Muse, that ‘loveliest maid’ the great creative force, cannot exist in either this ‘degenerate’ time or this ‘degenerate’ country. Neither can the ’nurse of every virtue’ stay behind when its people depart. The gift of the Muse, the Muse itself, the capacity for joy, for laughter, for originality is inseparable from the people and must sail away with them.

This conceit of Goldsmith’s; that the muse, out of shame, would wholly abandon ‘degenerate’ England and instead offer her favours to the New Wortld, was quietly prescient, it also demonstrates Goldsmith’s belief that a peasantry, by recreating itself in these new locations proves;
‘…self dependent power can time defy..’
and that countries in possession of a people;
‘…that states of native strength possesr
though very poor, may still be very blest…’

Nowadays some of the most creative people on the planet are products of these new worlds.

Nevertheless, Goldsmith hopes that as time passes and people learn, the Muse might;

This truth, this inevitability, this abandonment of  ‘degenerate’ England by the Muse has Goldsmith hope that as time passes and people learn, the Muse might;

‘Still let thy voice prevailing over time,
Redress the rigours of the inclement clime;
And slighted truth, with thy persuasive strain,
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain.
Teach him that states of native strength possest,
Though very poor, may still be very blest.
That trades proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As oceans sweep the labour’d mole away.
While self dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky.

Essentially, this is a poem about the destructive force of greed, of ‘trades proud empire’, and its devastating effect on the vast majority of a country’s population.  It also suggests that a country’s long term stable future can only be guaranteed if the ‘self dependent power’ of the peasantry is firmly established.  That is, a non-aspirational, well grounded, self-sufficient people who are absolutely independent of the deliberately manufactured ‘aspirational’ blandishments of our corrosive consumer society.

We still have some way to go.

Ira Maine, Poetry Editor.