Re-Populating "The Deserted Village"

Abstract

"His mind resembled a fertile, but thin soil." This was Boswell's opinion of Goldsmith, and though Johnson urged that he be remembered for his virtues rather than his faults, the verdict has pretty well stood.1 Goldsmith was the odd member of the circle of interesting types that gathered around Johnson, and though he was no less interesting than the rest, he was considered a second-class intellectual citizen. He was chided for not being a systematic thinker, for being overly concerned with "imaginary consequence," and for not having an especially large commitment to truth. The impression that comes down to us is of a bumbling, erratic man—a man with little disposition toward logic, unsystematic in his life and his thought, the perfect picture of the incompetent misfit who would have perished were it not for the concern of his friends, especially "the Great Cham of Literature." But as an artist, the impression is certainly different. The same praise paid by Johnson to Gray might also be said to apply to some of Goldsmith's productions: he wrote few works which survive, but those which we have are excellent. The Deserted Village" is such a work. That a man so disorganized and unsystematic in his personal life might rise to heights of literary organization is demonstrated by the treatment The Deserted Village" has received from subsequent critics. It has not been neglected by those who admire the coherence and logical progression of its structure, and it has been upon its logical structure that the most informed studies have been based. One such study has been done by Richard Eversole in which he concentrates on what he calls the "oratorical design" of the poem. In Eversole's view, Goldsmith's primary poetic problem in composing "The Deserted Village" was the effective presentation of controversial material. Goldsmith was aware that the views he was espousing in the poem were controversial, and that he would need the most oratorically effective presentation. To meet this difficulty, he chose the form of the classical oration. An examination of the poem will reveal that it falls into the traditional seven divisions of the classical oration: exordium, narratio, propositio, confirmatio, reprehensio, and peroratio.2 Ricardo Quintana takes what is perhaps a more useful approach to the poem when he suggests that the structure of "The Deserted Village" is that of an argument. He proceeds through the poem, section by section, and demonstrates how the argument develops. In the course of his study, he does nod in passing to the idea that in this poem the logical and the poetical