The New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852). William Golder and the beginnings of a national literature in New Zealand.
Dr Brian Opie
School of English, Film and Theatre
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand
Abstract
The first collection of poetry by a British settler to be
printed and published in New Zealand, William Golder’s The New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852), exemplifies
the process of cultural appropriation and displacement which
characterises colonisation. The conception of a national
literature which informs Golder’s poetry is, however, a
distinctive outcome of the cultural, philosophical, economic
and religious elements which combine to produce Scottish
cultural nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth
century. The role of the poet as minstrel in creating and
sustaining a democratic conception of the nation is
affirmed, in this case for a new nation yet to acquire the
attributes of a modern, civilised society. New Zealand is,
however, not a blank surface on which the languages of
Britain can be inscribed without modification, as Golder
demonstrates by incorporating Maori names and local settings
in his rewriting of traditional Scottish songs.
When William Golder (1810-1876) published The
New Zealand MinstrelsyThe New Zealand Minstrelsy: Containing Songs and
Poems on Colonial Subjects (Wellington: R. Stokes and
W. Lyon, 1852). This volume is available in an electronic
edition: [http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/index.html](http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/projects/golder/index.html)
by subscription in 1852, the first volume of poetry printed
and published in New Zealand, he had been living in the Hutt
Valley north of Wellington for 12 years, having arrived on one
of the first New Zealand Company ships, the Bengal Merchant, in 1840. It was not his first
publication. Before leaving Scotland he had published in 1838
a larger volume, also by subscription, containing poems, songs
and prose narratives, Recreations for Solitary
Hours.Recreations
for Solitary Hours, consisting of Poems, Songs and Tales, with
Notes (Glasgow: George Gallie; Edinburgh: W. Oliphant
& Son; London: Simpkins, Marshall & Co; Dublin:
J. Robertson; 1838).
A selection from this volume
was reprinted as an Appendix to The New Zealand
Minstrelsy, making the latter volume as a whole exemplify
the transitional character of emigrant culture — a physical
disjunction between present and past, recovery of the past
through recollection, and continuity in the translation of
cultural forms and practices to the new place. Like the first
Australian colonial poets discussed by Michael Ackland,Michael Ackland, That Shining
Band. A Study of Colonial Verse Tradition (St. Lucia,
Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1994).
Golder saw the development of a national literature as an
integral aspect of the formation of New Zealand as a modern
nation. The New Zealand Minstrelsy offers a
distinctive approach to satisfying this need, one deeply
informed by Golder’s social and cultural origins in the
Scottish Lowlands.
In their introduction to their anthology, Bards in the Wilderness. Australian Colonial Poetry
to 1920, Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell affirm that
“Poetry is one of the expressions of the community
consciousness; in surveying the poetry of Australia we have
kept very much in mind the community which produced it,
largely a provincial community. . . . our premise is that
poetry cannot be divorced from the society or the times out of
which it grew.”Brian Elliott
and Adrian Mitchell, Bards in the
Wilderness. Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920 (Melbourne
and Sydney: Thomas Nelson (Australia) Ltd., 1970),
p. xv.
In Golder’s case, the notion of
community is a doubled one, including both the early
establishment of settler society in the Wellington region and
his continuing association at a distance with the community of
his birthplace, Strathaven, and its region, the Scottish
Lowlands in both their rural and their industrialising, urban
aspects. Both of these communities can be described as
provincial, but the relation between metropolis and province,
empire and colony, is multilayered. As Michael Fry has argued,
in their participation in the world-wide expansion of the
British Empire, Scots carried with them their experience of
internal colonisation.Michael Fry,
The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh: Tuckwell
Press, 2001), pp. 493-95.
Furthermore, that
experience of engagement with dominant English and European
stereotypes of the Scot was productive of a cultural
nationalism in Scotland which was based in Calvinist
protestanism, its contribution to the subsequent and
distinctive development of the Scottish Enlightenment and, as
a specific aspect of that intellectual movement, in the
reframing of oral traditions (both the Lowlands ballads and
the Gaelic oral traditions of the clan culture of the
Highlands under the bardic mantle of Ossian) as the locus of
Scottish cultural difference and the foundation of Scottish
national literature and culture.Arthur H. Williamson, “Scots, Indians and
Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization
1519-1609”, Past and Present, No, 150
(1996), 46-83; Fry, The Scottish Empire,
pp. 55-62; Katie Trumpener, Bardic
Nationalism. The Romantic Novel and the British Empire
(Princeton University Press: Princeton, N. J., 1997), pp. 101,
246-7.
Channels of communication which occur within
the framework of empire but are not conducted through the
centre, described as transcolonial by Trumpener,Trumpener, Bardic
Nationalism, pp. 289-91.
are of considerable
significance in making possible the sharing of kinds of
knowledge, experience and cultural production which are
characteristic of settler communities and their complex
relations with the intellectual and aesthetic cultures of the
imperial homeland.Bill Bell,
“Crusoe’s Books: the Scottish Emigrant Reader in
the Nineteenth Century”, in eds. Bill Bell, Jonquil
Bevan and Philip Benet, Across Boundaries: Books
in Culture and Commerce (Winchester, Hampshire, U. K.:
St. Paul’s Bibliographies and New Castle, D. E.: Oak
Knoll Press, 2000), pp. 116-129.
The period in which William Golder developed his conception
of himself as a poet, the third and fourth decades of the
nineteenth century, was one of rapid social and cultural
change in the Scottish Lowlands. These changes are marked
biographically, in his occupations of agricultural labourer,
weaver, primary school teacher, poet and settler. The title
page of Recreations For Solitary Hours
describes him as “Infant Teacher” at a school in
Newton, on the outskirts of Edinburgh; one of the tales which
it includes refers to an experience in Glasgow while he was
training at the innovative Glasgow Normal School.See Laurance James Saunders, Scottish Democracy 1815-1840: The Social and
Intellectual Background, (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd,
1950), pp. 277-9, 295-300, on the innovations in education and
teacher training led by David Stow in Glasgow.
The
event which led to his decision to emigrate with his wife and
young family was his wife’s conversion to Catholicism,
which immediately debarred him from further advancing a career
as a teacher in Scotland. His farming experience, not his
capabilities as a teacher (or his sense of vocation as a
poet), secured his selection for emigration by the New Zealand
Company.
Given his social background and his self-achieved literacy,
it might seem astonishing that such a man could propose, once
in New Zealand, that he might help found a national
literature. Ackland notes about Australian poets of the same
period that “the struggle to found a national literature
[was] an abiding local goal” and that “this was an
age which demanded and expected indigenous
literatures. Scotland, Italy, and Germany had all found
individual tongue, with imaginative writing contributing
significantly to a nascent national identity.”That Shining Band,
pp. 3, 6.
What led Golder to think that he could
make such a contribution in New Zealand?
The New Zealand Minstrelsy —
structure and contents
A comparison with Golder’s other volumes of
poetry,The
Pigeons’ Parliament; A Poem of the Year 1845. In Four
Cantos with Notes. To which is added, Thoughts on the
Wairarapa, and Other Stanzas. (Wellington: W. Lyon,
1854); The New Zealand Survey; A Poem in Five
Cantoes. With Notes Illustrative of New Zealand Progress and
Future Prospects. Also The Crystal Palace of 1851; A Poem in
Two Cantoes. With other Poems and Lyrics (Wellington:
J. Stoddart and Co., 1867); and The Philosophy of
Love. [A Plea in Defence of Virtue and Truth!] A Poem in Six
Cantos, with Other Poems (Wellington: W. Golder,
1871).
which were published in 1854, 1867 and 1871,
shows that the order of poems in each volume is not
accidental; there is a consistent pattern, the poems being
arranged in a sequence beginning at the poet’s present
location and concluding at a remote location which can only be
recollected or known imaginatively. The most common form of
this pattern is that of a mental movement from the present
towards the future (prospect) or the past (retrospect); the
actual moment in time which brings these dimensions of
experience and knowledge immediately together is the turn from
the old year to the new.The
instance in New Zealand Minstrelsy is
“Stanzas, extemporaneously written during the egress of
1833, and the ingress of 1834”, Appendix,
pp. x-xii.
Perceiving this pattern is more
complicated in The New Zealand Minstrelsy
because of its inclusion of a selection from his
pre-emigration volume, RecollectionsRecreations for Solitary
Hours, as an appendix. However, it informs the
arrangement of the volume and each group of poems. The poems
written since arrival in New Zealand come first, and the first
poem is set in the Hutt Valley beside the Erratonga (now Hutt)
River. Of the thirty three poems using a diversity of speakers
and stanza forms which follow, all but four are provided with
Scottish tunes and their subjects are various aspects of
settler work, social relations, domestic life and Christian
faith, with emigration as a dominant theme. Those without
tunes include one sonnet, one epigram, a blank verse memorial
to a friend who has died, and the celebratory ode written as
the emigrant ship approached New Zealand. The five religious
poems which are collected together at the end of the group
place the preceding poems in a context which points to the
future and reframes the emigrant’s journey as the
Christian’s journey through life, the first poem,
“The Christian’s March”, beginning with the
words, “We are bound for the Kingdom of God”. The
social and sociable concerns of the secular lyrics are brought
within the prospect of salvation, the group concluding with
“The Christian’s Joy”, a poem in which the
poet instructs his soul “To sing thy Saviour’s
praise” and which ends with the affirmation that
“in his name salvation’s free/To all the human
race.”New
Zealand Minstrelsy, p. 45.
By reprinting in Wellington a selection from RecollectionsRecreations for Solitary Hours as an appendix,
Golder literally placed his first book in the past while at
the same time providing a precedent for his claim for public
recognition as a poet. The poems in this group have clearly
been selected and arranged to demonstrate both his poetic and
political development. He also made a significant decision
about what was transferable to his new place of
settlement. Broadly speaking, he included poems which
demonstrate the range of kinds of poem in the first
publication, especially those which have to do with poetic
vocation, but he seems to exclude those which are in various
ways tied to specific circumstances or people associated with
his life in Scotland. He retained poems on themes which
remained important to him throughout his life, including love,
loss, friendship, memory, the purposes of poetry, learning,
and the role of Britain as the world’s leading civilised
nation. The poem with which this group, and the volume,
concludes — “Patriotic Breathing.—An
Ode. Written at the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832”
- strikes the same note as “The Christian’s
Joy” in its emphasis upon freedom from tyranny,
spiritual and political, as the gift of the Saviour and
Britannia respectively to humanity.
“
Erratonga”
The single most important sign of Golder’s
self-conscious relocating of himself and his poetic work in
New Zealand is the first poem in the volume,
“Erratonga”. The position of this poem repeats the
arrangement of RecollectionsRecreations for Solitary Hours, in which
another meditative poem with a local river setting, “A
Morning’s Visit to Kype’s Cascade”, opens
the collection. As well as marking the present place of the
volume as New Zealand, in another respect
“Erratonga” displaces the Scottish locality as the
scene identified with Golder’s poetic work; the earlier
poem is not reprinted in the appendix. This positioning
identifies a complex cultural action, which might be called a
mutual appropriation. Most obviously, Golder captures the New
Zealand locality by incorporating a local name within a
European poetic form, language and poetic conventions: the
form is that of a song to be sung to the tune, “Maid of
Islay”; the language is English, although the
river’s name clearly is not. The conventions are the
defining of a locality by the name of its river, and a river
as the sympathetic and beautiful space in nature accommodating
an emigrant lover’s solitary meditation.Robert Crawford, Devolving English
Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), comments on
Burns’s use of local river names: “The use of
place-names and dialect forces readers to consider the
text’s local origin as part of the poem’s meaning,
its assertion that the bardie’s apparently obscure,
small culture may be valued at least as much as the
poet’s grand, celebrated one”
(p. 94).
But there is also a reverse capture, that of the
conventions, language, and form by the locality. Throughout
his thirty six years in New Zealand, Golder persistently
reaffirmed the foundation of his sense of identity as the
scene and setting of his birthplace, Strathaven. The key
features of this place of origin are the town’s history
as a site of religious and political radicalism, and the
topographical landmarks which define its environs, most
especially its rivers. Pastoral poetry and actual behaviour
intersect closely in this process of identity formation; other
examples of it are given in accounts of three other Scots
poets from the same region as Golder to whom he refers in his
later publications. Thomas Pringle (1789-1834, an emigrant to
South Africa in the 1820s), Robert Pollok (1798-1827), and
James Nicholson (1822-1897, also from Strathaven) all walk
extensively in the environs of their homes, having favourite
and secluded places in which to meditate, either by rivers or
waterfalls, or on high points which permit panoramic views
over the home territory. Both Pringle and Golder as emigrant
poets deliberately relocate their poetry from Scotland to the
colonies by their use of local names while continuing to
confirm their identities through the interiorisation of a
physical locality and its repetition in poetic description and
narrative.Trumpener notes of Thomas
Pringle’s African Sketches (1834)
that, “even as Pringle traverses and describes the
countryside of Southern Africa, he continually evokes the
landscapes of Scottish literature” (Bardic
Nationalism, p. 255). For Golder, the shift of location
may have not represented such a major disjunction. In a poem
included in the Appendix to New Zealand
Minstrelsy, “Sweet Home”, he evokes
“Caledonia” as a place of “social
delights” and of “wildness and picturesque
grandeur”, in which “thy sons [are] independent
and free” (pp. xvi-xvii).
It is apparent that
his early formation, centred on Strathaven and the part of his
family which continued to live there, continued throughout his
life to exercise a powerful influence over him — the
typical, melancholic condition of the emigrant/exile separated
from “home”. But his determination also to work to
realise the future in a place so palpably not Scotland, to
become a New Zealander in the process of working out what that
might mean through the formation of a new nation, is signified
in his placing of the New Zealand poems first in The New Zealand Minstrelsy and, following the
preface in which he affirms the value of poetry in the
creating of a new society and nation, by placing a Maori name
as the first word the reader encounters.Ackland, That Shining Band,
pp. 28-31. He discusses the use of the genius loci in early
Australian poetry, pp. 33-4, 39-40.
In this
respect, just as Scotland is to be distinguished poetically
from England through settings, place names and linguistic
differences, so might New Zealand be; the new land is not
wholly silent, local names immediately signifying difference
of location and hence the possibility of the difference of the
cultural nation as well within the larger order of the British
empire.John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic
Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), p.9, argues that
“cultural nationalism . . . has its own distinctive aims
— the moral regeneration of the national community
rather than the achievement of an autonomous
state. . . .invocation of the past, contrary to accepted
opinion, must be seen in a positive light, for the cultural
nationalist seeks not to ‘regress’ into an arcadia
but rather to inspire his community to ever higher stages of
development” (p. 9).
Another sign of this intersection of pastoral and actual
settings is the naming by Golder of the three houses he built
and occupied.See Patricia
Golder, The Golders of Upper Hutt and Hukanui
1840-2000, and associated families: The Browns, Martins,
McCools and Somers (Wellington, 2000), p. 19.
The first, in a clearing in the dense bush of the Hutt Valley,
he called “Sylvan Grange”. It could be that this
fully pastoral name is ironic, but he has left no direct
comment about it.He describes the
accidental destruction of this house, and the refusal of a
neighbour to provide temporary shelter for his family, in a
note to “The Pigeons’ Parliament”, in The Pigeons’ Parliament; A Poem of the Year
1845., pp. 76-78. David Bunn discusses such naming as a
“trope of rustic retirement common in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries”, in
“‘Our Wattled Cot’: Mercantile and Domestic
Space in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes”, in
Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
pp.148-153. On the cottage in Victorian literature and
imagination, see George H. Ford, “Felicitous Space: The
Cottage Controversy” in Nature and the
Victorian Imagination, edited by U. C Knoepflmacher and
G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of California Press, 1977), pp. 27-48.
The next,
adopting the Maori name for the area, he called
“Petoni”. The third, on a new farm which he
developed on the western hills above the valley, he named
“Mountain Home”. The latter has a special
significance in this series because it affirms in the simplest
way not only that, whatever his memory might put before him,
he is now “at home” in New Zealand but that he has
also left the containing space of the valley for the
panoramic, visionary space above it.See “The New Zealand Survey”, Preface.
Furthermore, the house
is itself a sign. In one of his early poems, “Stanzas,
Extemporaneously Written On A Stormy Night, Dalserf, November
4, 1833.”, which is reprinted in the Appendix, while his
family sleeps during a fierce storm, he considers the lot of
all those who lack shelter on such a night:
Has ev’ry homeless wand’rer shelter found,
’Neath hospitable roof, or humbler shed?
Or has there any from th’unfriendly door,
Been spurn’d, who has not where to lay his head?
Oh Heaven! who has nature in control,
Spare! spare! oh spare! and quell the angry storm;
Oh! pity now the poor belated wretch,
The naughty niggard scorns to house from harm. . . .
I feel for those, whose fates are to endure,
The midnight hazards of the stormy waves:
Oh Heaven! shield them with thy guardian pow’r,
Them ward from wrecks, and from untimely graves.
Let Heav’n be praised! who me from such preserved,
And in His providence has kindly bless’d
Me with a home,—thus cabin’d from the storm,
Provided with a couch, on which to rest.
Such sentiments remained a constant feature of
Golder’s thinking about society and the situation of the
family, and are otherwise articulated in the first poem in the
Appendix in the fact and figure of the lark’s nest. In
contrast to David Bunn’s interpretation of the
“simple settler cottage” in South Africa as
“symbols of rustic retirement and class distinction
[and] sites of ideological dissemination, points from which
English standards of taste and gentility radiate out into the
loneliness”,David Bunn,
“‘Our Wattled Cot’”, p. 150.
for Golder in Scotland as well as New Zealand
the cottage is “home”, a place of protection from
both nature and society for the family unit, in which he can
reflect and write after the day’s work is done.
Poetry and the nation
In his preface to The New Zealand
Minstrelsy, Golder explains why he decided to publish
this volume:
in appearing again as an author, it is not, I confess,
without some slight hope that this little attempt in the
matter of song may tend not only to add to the literature of
our Colony, thereby extracting some of the sweets which lie
hid among the many asperities of colonial life; but also to
endear our adopted country the more to the bosom of the bonâ fide settler; as such, in days of yore,
has often induced a people to take a firmer hold of their
country, by not only inspiring them with a spirit of
patriotic magnanimity, but also in making them the more
connected as a people in the eyes of others.
Recreations For Solitary Hours and The New Zealand Minstrelsy both refer directly
to only one other writer, the Scottish poet, essayist and
educator James Beattie (1735-1803), through epigraphs drawn
from his poem, The Minstrel or, The Progress of
Genius (1771-1774). But their format reflects other
contemporary publications of Scottish poetry, like James
Hogg’s early ballad collection, The Forest
Minstrel (1810). The importance of such collections in
the formation of Scottish cultural nationalism in the early
nineteenth century, drawing from and building upon the poetry
of Robert Burns and earlier writers in the Scottish vernacular
movement, has been widely discussed. Thomas Crawford
summarises his view of the importance of popular song
traditions by affirming that “Each resurgence of the
creative spirit in Scotland since 1707 has been associated
with renewed interest in popular culture and with something of
a ‘folk revival’; each has felt the need to tap
the popular tradition which is, perhaps, the most abidingly
national part of our culture.”Thomas Crawford, “Lowland Song and
Popular Tradition in the Eighteenth Century”, in
ed. Andrew Hook, The History of Scottish
Literature, Vol. 2, (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1987), p. 137. A valuable assessment of the diverse strands in
the eighteenth-century creation of Scottish cultural identity
is provided by Andrew Hook, “Scotland and Romanticism:
The International Scene”, pp. 307-321 of the same
volume.
Although Golder knew when he published Recreations For Solitary Hours that he was
intending to emigrate, the poems themselves were written in
the immediate context of poetic practice in Lowland
Scotland. Lyrics and songs predominate, with a named tune
being provided for each song. The inclusion of prose
narratives of actual events complements the orientation
towards actual social situations in the poems and songs, just
as does the plain language, whether Scots or English. The
volume signals its contemporaneity, addressing a present
audience in terms which that audience is taken to expect or
find familiar. Thomas Crawford’s analysis of Scottish
song culture in Society and the Lyric. A study of
the Song Culture of eighteenth century Scotland
demonstrates how high and popular cultures in Scotland
intersected in the composition and performance of songs. He
distinguishes between two kinds of song, action songs and
national songs, in a way which is helpful for understanding
Golder’s aims in his first volume and the way in which
they translate into the New Zealand situation. Crawford notes
that popular song was a “medium which could be used by men and women in every walk of life to
render their experiences, however slightly these might differ
from their fellows’”, and asks, “How, then,
did their action songs contrast with what have been termed
national songs - the deliberate, creative and systematic
attempt by the professionals, Ramsay and Burns and a number of
lesser men and women, to produce a new corpus of song for the
whole people of Scotland by a combination of purposive editing
and the fitting of new words to old tunes?” He argues
that the difference is one of degree, since many national
songs were initially personal and occasional in their
composition and circulation. Writers like Ramsay and Burns
“saw themselves as (in a modern metaphor) cultural
engineers, consciously preserving and recreating the
nation’s songs”.Thomas
Crawford, Society and the Lyric. A study of the
Song Culture of eighteenth century Scotland (1979),
pp.164, 172.
As Crawford implies, the constant feature is the tune, the
link with community, custom and tradition; it is the words
which can be rewritten to permit the inclusion of other
experiences within the already known structure of the
tune. Golder makes this point himself in a note attached to
the first of the religious songs in The New Zealand
Minstrelsy, while emphasising that the subject of the song has
a moral relation to the music:
As in music there are many tunes, though unconnected with
words, expressive of much feeling, corresponding with the
several sympathies existing in the soul of man, so have I
taken the liberty of shewing, how they can be improved by
applying some to subjects of a sacred nature.“The Christian’s
March”, p. 41.
Such a conception of poetic composition places that which
is already known and shared by a community, the tune, ahead of
the invention of the poet. But Golder also proposes that a
familiar tune, representing a particular emotional quality in
human nature, will be “improved” when it is
performed with new, “sacred” words. This work of
the poet enables improvement in society to occur exactly
because it inserts a better content into an already known,
communally shared form. Such writing becomes of national
significance, in these terms, when it is adopted widely as the
preferred wording for a tune which is itself already generally
known and performed by people at all levels of society. While
oral transmission traditionally achieves this result for
popular song, Golder’s inventions in song form are
recorded and disseminated in print; he makes use, that is, of
a communications technology which has only recently become
available to members of the working class and by means of
which they can contribute to the ongoing production of a
national culture.
One example is his composition of new lyrics for the tune
“Flowers of the Forest”, which Crawford discusses
as an example of the links between “national” and
“action” song.Crawford,
Society and the Lyric,
pp. 176-77.
Crawford shows that three sets of words
were published in the 1760s, all achieving the status of
national songs. Two sets use the remnants of the old ballad,
“I’ve heard a lilting at our ewe’s
milking” and “The flowers of the forest are
a’ wede away”; the third set departs entirely from
these words and is, as Crawford describes it, “a lament,
not for a local community or a nation’s chivalry, but
for one young man who has been drowned.” Golder in his
two sets uses the stanza form of the first two, does not use
the line which provides the name for the tune, and follows the
narrative of the third set. “Donald’s
Return”, in Recreations for Solitary
Hours and republished in the Appendix to The
New Zealand Minstrelsy, is a story in which “bonny
young Mary” anticipates the loss of her lover, Donald,
in a storm at sea but is then relieved by his return and his
promise not to go to sea again; “Mr T—’s
Dirge to the Memory of W. Cook, Drowned April 10, 1847”
is a poem expressing the speaker’s grief at the loss of
a close friend. These changes suggest a deliberate decision by
Golder, both to choose the more traditional version of the
tune and to write for it a lyric in which an event of personal
rather than historical significance is lamented. In this way,
a history which cannot become part of the narrative of the
nation of New Zealand is written out of the poetry, and the
representative significance of local and personal events is
written in.
The concept of a national literature which is at work here
is given further definition in a lecture by the first
Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh University, W E
Aytoun. In his discussion of the vernacular basis of Scottish
humanism in The Democratic Intellect, George
Elder Davie discusses the approach taken by Aytoun to the
problem of the relation between Scottish and English
poetry. Aytoun employs “‘the distinction between
natural poetry which is minstrelsy and artificial poetry which
in default of a better name you may call aesthetical
composition’. He argues that there is a connection
between the Scottish tradition of poetry as natural and the
democratic basis of Scottish society.” On this basis,
Aytoun proposes that there is
nothing national in either Spenser or Milton or Pope, or
Dryden, or Byron, or Wordsworth, or many more. They are
great poets, no doubt, but the people don’t sympathise
with them, though portions of the intellectual and educated
classes may do so; and taking them together, what kind of
congruity either of sentiment or of form do you find in
their work? But take Burns and Scott and Hogg, and
Motherwell, and Allan Cunningham, with their predecessors
David Lyndsay and Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson - they
are adored of the people. And why? Because they are
minstrels and because they embody in vivid strains the
emotions, thoughts - nay, prejudices, if you will - which
are most rife in the national bosom.George Elder Davie, The Democratic
Intellect. Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth
Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961),
pp.208-9.
Golder’s aim in The New Zealand
Minstrelsy to contribute to the establishment of a
national literature is properly contextualised by this
statement, which proposes that the value of poetry is to be
judged by the extent to which it can represent (reflect and
shape) the distinctive and shared qualities of a people, a
national community, in words and forms able to appeal equally
to all of its members. It might be assumed from Golder’s
statement of aim that his conviction that a national
literature for New Zealand could and should be created was
based on the personal, social and cultural value he attributed
to Scottish poetry as the substance of his national
literature, in contrast to the valuation of poets according to
a scale of greatness of literary achievement. This is
certainly the position adopted by Rev Charles Rogers, the
editor of The Scottish Minstrel, in which
the poetry of “the humbler bards” is, like the
poets themselves, shown the same respect as the poetry of more
educated writers because all share the same “poetic
gift” and all contribute to sustaining the
“national spirit” through “popular
song”.Rev Charles Rogers, The Scottish Minstrel. The Songs of Scotland
subsequent to Burns with Memoirs of the Poets, 2nd
edition (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1873), pp. vii,
v.
Golder and the Communitarian Lyric
The romantic movement provides another important context
for interpreting Golder’s poetry. He shows no interest
in the recovery of the past, either as folk culture or as
chivalric and national history; he does place great value on
nature, imagination and reflection, but without drawing his
reader into a distinctively private realm of experience of the
self or by adopting a radical politics. His apparent
disinterest in some of the key features of romantic poetry is
explained in Janowitz’s particularly helpful study of
what she terms the dialectic of romanticism. She argues that
there are two distinct modalities of romantic poetry, derived
from “the opposition of individual and
collective”. While “the singular lyric
voice” gave expression to “the revolutionary idea
of a democratic voice in the age of revolution”, that
idea was also expressed in “the notion of a
collectivised popular sovereignty, which drew upon customary
culture and its popular poetic forms.” Her conclusion is
that “romantic poetry models experience in two distinct
forms, the extremes of which I am calling the individualist
and the communitarian. At one end are situated those lyrics
whose voice is singular, most often masculine, and
voluntaristic; at the other end are those which produce a
lyric ‘we’.Anne
Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic
Tradition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
pp.12, 17.
The New Zealand Minstrelsy is undeniably
to be located at the communitarian end of the
scale. Golder’s lyric poetry, which constitutes most of
the volume, takes its stanza form from the tune to which it is
written. Each poem is a little narrative, the speaker in some
poems being an observer of a social event and in others one of
the participants, male or female. What constitutes the poem is
an immediately imaginable event or situation and a trajectory
through a crisis, the import of which is registered morally
and emotionally. The language is plain and direct, consistent
with the immediacy and typicality of the situation and
setting. Basically what changes between the poems in the
Appendix and the New Zealand section is the setting, from a
land intensively socialised to a new country in which nature
is wild and its indigenous inhabitants correspondingly
savage. Poems with the laborious work of land clearance as
their setting focus on the familial context and purpose of the
work, and the means of maintaining emotional stability:
Evening Industry
Tune—“’Twas in the merry month of May.”
The moon had fill’d her horn on high,
And pour’d on earth her silv’ry sheen,
A still and cloudless azure sky
Proclaim’d her night’s own radiant queen.
The clearing, round beneath her smile,
Seem’d gladden’d, as by day’s bright noon;
The eager bushman, late at toil,
Rejoiced at having such a boon.
’Mong prostrate logs his work he plied,
His axe disturbing night’s dull ear;
To breathe, on axe he lean’d, and eyed
The moon, whose smile his heart did cheer.
The thoughts of home, and former joys,
Insensibly stole o’er his mind;
And fond remembrance drew a sigh,
For friends, endear’d, he left behind.
At once his crosses, toils, and cares,
From first endured, in bold array,
Upon him sprung in unawares,
As better feelings fain to sway;
But from his humble cottage, lone,
His wife’s sweet strains fell on his ear,
Which his attention roused, anon
His drooping spirits fain to cheer.
“Those wand’ring thoughts still let me spurn,”—
He cried,—“since she’d my cares beguile;
Nor shall I hapless fortune mourn,
Since love alone can lighten toil!”
With this, again, his axe he plied,
Cheer’d by her mellow’d strains the while;
And ev’ry stroke he gave replied,
’Tis surely love that lightens toil!Ibid., pp. 23-24.
What evidently mattered most to Golder in the broad
spectrum of social situations was the bond of love and
affection between two people, whether as a heterosexual couple
or as friends, which includes same sex and sibling
relationships. Many poems in The New Zealand Minstrelsy tell
of personal loss.Ian Reid, in
“Marking the Unmarked: An Epitaphic Preoccupation in
Nineteenth-Century Australian Poetry”, Victorian Poetry, 40 (2002), p.9, observes that
much Victorian poetry written in Australia constitutes
“a kind of epitaphic writing that can involve
considerably more than sentimentalized gestures of personal
bereavement and conventional pathos. It can become a way of
reflecting on the act of inscription itself as a testimony to,
and surrogate for, lost meanings.”
The larger
public or political context, typically war or separation
through emigration, is simply presented as a given; what is
noticed is the effect of such events, usually cruel, on the
lives and feelings of specific people. Two poems which
strikingly confirm Golder’s interest in the emotional
significance of events are “Wairau:—Or
Col. W—’s Dirge to the Memory of his Brother”,
to the tune, “Wallace’s Lament”, and, in the
Appendix, “A Translation of an Episode in
Ossian”. The latter versifies a brief segment which
foregrounds by anticipation the state of mind of a young woman
who is yet to find out that her lover has been killed in
battle; the former takes up an incident which, more than any
other, served to highlight the tensions between Maori and
Pakeha“Pakeha” is the
term generally adopted by the indigenous people of New Zealand
to refer to European settlers. While not universally accepted,
it is now commonly used by the descendants of the settlers to
mean “New Zealander of English or European
origin”.
, and the New Zealand Company and the
British administration, in the Wellington region as the number
of settlers increased and the process by which the New Zealand
Company had acquired land continued to be investigated.Philip Temple, A Sort of
Conscience (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002),
pp. 311-22.
Characteristically, Golder does not
focus on the violence between Maori and Pakeha or on the
circumstances which led to it but, as in the Ossian episode,
on the memories and feelings of one remote from the action who
loses a loved person - in this case, the loss by William
Wakefield, principal agent and leader of the settlement, of
his brother Arthur Wakefield. William is the speaker:
Though pleasing, around thee, thy scenes, Waiarau!
’Tis painful to think on the deeds of thy day;
Though all to their fates, so resistless must bow,
I grieve for the victims who fell in thy fray.
But chiefly I mourn thee, my own dearest brother!
And shrink at the thought of thy mangled remains;
The loss I sustain can be felt by no other,
As long as thy mem’ry my bosom retains.
The savage may glory in deeds unrepaid,
And cowardly taunt thee, now low in thy grave;
They’ll yet in the balance of justice be weigh’d,
And vengeance shall visit when nought can them save.
But still, I’m depriv’d of thy friendship, my brother!
Which none can replace, as thy worth all can tell;
The cold hand of death now thy ashes may smother,
Thy mem’ry shall live, though I
sigh thee farewell.New Zealand Minstrelsy,
p.24.
With one important exception, what Ackland writes of
Golder’s contemporary, the Australian poet Charles
Harpur (1813-1868), is also broadly true for Golder:
his writings are inspired by the belief that the colonies
presented the newly arrived white settlers with a unique
opportunity. Here they could attempt to rebuild
mankind’s original paradise, or they could reproduce
our primal errors. . . . An openended vision of creation,
and a progressivist conception of mankind are the
consequences of [his] republican credo, together with an
awesome awareness of individual responsibility, if humanity
is to achieve at last its potentially exalted role in a
larger, providential plan.Ackland, That Shining Band,
pp. 54-55. Ackland, in “From Wilderness to Landscape:
Charles Harpur’s Dialogue with Wordsworth and
Antipodean Nature”, Victorian
Poetry, 40 (2002), p. 21, provides other dimensions of
both comparison and contrast between the two poets. He
describes Harpur as “largely self-educated” and
(in this respect unlike Golder) as searching for
“empowering models, working his way through the greats
of English prosody from Chaucer to
Shakespeare.”
The exception is republicanism. Golder affirmed the
monarchy throughout his life, writing occasional poems on
important royal events. Their constant point was to reaffirm
the need for moral and intellectual leadership, the special
role of those in high office to nurture and advance the
foundations of British (but also human) civilisation.Michael Fry, in The Scottish
Empire, seems to describe Golder’s position when he
writes that “If [Enlightened Scots] saw themselves as
liberals, their liberalism counselled not violence but
moderation and reform to correct abuse. . . . Not even Hume
and Smith, let alone the rest, accepted . . . any idea of
government founded on popular consent. . . . Enlightened
thought never meant to discard the inherited order, at home or
abroad. Progress in the forms it extolled would long fail to
shake the conservative concepts of loyalty and hierarchy
rooted in the Scottish psyche” (p. 62).
His
dedication of The New Zealand Survey to Sir
George Grey, who had in 1861 taken up the position of Governor
of New Zealand for the second time, is only the most explicit
expression of his view that Grey fulfilled this conception of
leadership. The first two volumes were published during the
last two years of Grey’s first period as Governor, the
second (in 1854) including a long satirical poem set in 1845,
the year Grey arrived in New Zealand to Golder’s strong
approval. In The New Zealand Minstrelsy Sir
George Grey tops the subscription list both by office and as
the subscriber for the largest number of copies, and Golder
includes a poem which praises Grey as governor, “The
Effects of Good Government, or The Happy Change”, a song
sung “by an English mother to her
‘kitty’” and the only one in the volume with
an original tune (the music for which has not survived):
For our Governors ruled with a stiff iron rod,—
All labour was quite at a stand;
For nothing had they done to advance the public good,
Making sorrow prevail through the land.
Now then, dance high, my dovey,
We have alter’d times, my lovie,
Let us happy be now, as we may;
Once we could not get a sow,
Now your dad has bought a cow;—
Hearty thanks to our Governor Grey!
To face grinding tyrants no longer he toils,
For scarcely a living, though spare;—
Thus Providence over good government smiles,
And frees us from sorrow and care.Ibid., p. 29.
Poetry and the Future of the Nation
The most unusual poem in The New Zealand
Minstrelsy is the one which Golder wrote shortly before
arriving in New Zealand, “Stanzas, Written while on the
Voyage out to New Zealand on Board the ‘Bengal
Merchant’, January 14, 1840.” It is a celebratory
ode, strongly endorsing the aims and purposes of the Wakefield
plan for the settlement of New Zealand and envisaging the
nation’s future as an agent of civilised development in
the Pacific. It is also structured as a moment in perception
which is particularly resonant for Golder, that of a moment in
present time which is also the intersection of past and
future. Its imperial context is Britannia’s presence
“in every quarter of this active world” as the
agent of civilization through “humanity”, that is,
Christian and secular knowledge which replaces war,
superstition and the waste productivity of nature with peace,
industry, commerce and abundance. The poem’s imagined
scene is social, the meeting of two peoples: the New
Zealanders, included among the “savage nations, which
inherit/The sea-girt isles, which long obscurely lay/Beyond
[Britannia’s] former ken”; and the Britons, who
are coming to “adopt your country as our home”. In
his imaginary address to the New Zealanders, Golder begins,
“Fear not, New Zealander! we do not come/With hostile
feelings, but with all good will . . ./No faithless friendship
offer we for gain”. In a note to the words, “Oh
happy plan!— ingenuously devised!”, Golder underlines
his confidence in the Wakefield plan and demonstrates why
Maori have good reason to fear the arrival of the settlers:
“the Wakefield method of purchasing territory for
colonization; then bestowing part of the land for the benefit
of the natives [replaces] taking the land by force, and
exterminating its inhabitants, as has often been done by other
nations in former years.” The knowledge of Maori which
he demonstrates in the poem clearly has not been derived from
first-hand experience; it does, however, seem entirely
consistent with the account given in G. L. Craik’s The New Zealanders, which provided an extensive
appraisal of the qualities and circumstances of the indigenous
people. However, there is also a more general context for
Golder’s thinking about the kind of relation between
settlers and indigenous peoples which he is promoting in his
poem. As Christopher Berry has shown, Scottish Enlightenment
thinkers argued that “The diversity of social experience
and thence the diversity of moral beliefs, is explicable by
reference to the uniformity and universality of human
nature. In their infancy, societies are rude; . . . but
refinement comes with cultivation. And cultivation, whether
moral, religious or aesthetic, comes along with the success of
mankind in triumphing over the dictatorship of needs. . . . As
humans win the time to contemplate, so they leave the kingdom
of necessity and enter the realm of freedom. Life in a free
and civilised society is a better life than all that has gone
before.”Christopher J. Berry,
Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997),
p. 181.
This broad perspective over the whole
history of human social development is intrinsic to
Golder’s thinking and provides the foundation on which
he engages hopefully with the New Zealand wilderness and its
indigenous people.
Golder also provides a perspective from his own family
history. Among the tales which he published in Recreations for Solitary Hours but did not
republish in New Zealand is a story derived from his
father’s military experience in South Africa, “An
Incident in the Life of my Father; or, the Murderer
Detected. A Tale.” The story records the actions of his
father, after witnessing the beating of two African slaves by
Irish soldiers which caused the death of one of them, in
reporting the incident and being the cause of the
soldiers’ arrest. The clear purpose of the story is to
illustrate in two ways the unnaturalness of slavery. Firstly,
it dehumanises the slave: “because the murdered man was
only considered the property of his master . . . a charge of
damages was all that was required to repair the loss
sustained”; but this decision left Golder’s father
“musing on the injustice of letting one guilty of the
murder of a man, even although he was a slave, escape the
vengeance which the laws of nature required.”Recreations for Solitary
Hours, pp. 163-164.
Secondly (and consistently
with the long tradition of protestant casuistry), the soldiers
who committed the crime suffer in conscience, one coming to
Golder’s father to discuss his torment of mind, and the
other committing suicide.
It is possible to dismiss Golder’s invitation to
Maori, to “Bid Britons welcome”, as wishful
thinking expressive of his anxiety that the New Zealanders may
not read the settlers’ intentions in the way Golder
wants them to; but I would argue that what he is offering is a
conception of New Zealand as a socially, morally,
economically, and intellectually advanced nation, the benefits
of which all of its people will share as they build it
together in friendship, a fundamental mark of humanity for
Golder.[G. L. Craik], The Library of Entertaining Knowledge. The New
Zealanders (London: Charles Knight, 1830), p. 16:
“[The New Zealander] is as capable of friendship as of
enmity . . . when brought into contact with a nation which
neither insults nor oppresses him, and which exhibits to him
the influence of a benevolent religion in connexion with the
force of practical knowledge.” See also “A Tribute
to the Memory of Friendship” in The New
Zealand Minstrelsy, p. 38, and Berry, Social
Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 28-29, where he
shows that, for Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, friendship
and loyalty are “the most genuinely social [bonds]” because they demonstrate
“the human capacity to bond on principles that go beyond
both the instinct for self-preservation and judicious
calculation of self-interest.”
The moment of
this anticipated meeting, which is actually imminent, is
contained within two other perspectives, the past and the
future. The past contains Scotland, “the country we have
left behind” which “Has fields less fertile, less
propitious skies”, and “friendship’s love,—
a painful sacrifice”; the future is one of
“blessings realised” as the outcome of the
Wakefield plan. Golder shows that the past will continue to
play a part in the present, as “oft shall scenes
frequented, now resign’d,/Be drawn by fancy — as before
our eyes”; the same faculty of imagination will sustain
the effort of realising the civilising plan through individual
action over many generations. And, as in the specific instance
of this poem, poetry will provide a social space in which
actuality and the imagined future which powerfully motivates
effort in the present interact to produce a form of moral
knowledge able to constitute in the minds of its diverse
peoples a common idea of what is distinctive about the
nation-to-be of New Zealand.
Another way of making the point about the distinctiveness
of this poem is by reading it against another poem written at
the same time by another passenger on the Bengal
Merchant, Alexander Marjoribanks. In contrast to the way
in which Golder’s mind is focussed on the imminence of
the settlers’ encounter with a new land and a different
people, and locates that moment in the larger context of
civilization (moral, scientific, democratic and Christian) and
human progress, Marjoribanks (despite his own conviction about
the superiority of his poem) writes conventional verses which
could have been written after a sea journey between Scotland
and almost anywhere else. His poem concludes with the
sentiment:
And now that we have plough’d the stormy deep,
And anchor’d safely on a foreign strand,
Let’s sing the praises of the gallant ship,
That’s wafted us unto this smiling land.
The partial exception is the following stanza:
Once more the hubbub on the deck is heard,
Once more the sextant fills the Captain’s hand;
Once more the gallant Lawyer mounts his guard,
Prepar’d for fight in yonder savage land.
Arrival is accompanied by mixed feelings, of relief at
having survived the journey (“smiling land”) and
the anticipation of violence (“savage land”). No
effort is made to relate these different attributes, or to
think beyond them to a more considered view of the possible
future. The contrast highlights Golder’s intellectual
coherence and the constructive ways in which he sought to give
imaginative and poetic definition to the moment of
contact.
Other poems written after “Stanzas” about the
labour of bush clearing and farming need to be read as both
rewritings of traditional labouring songs and records of the
way in which the progressive thinking elaborated in
“Stanzas” is enacted in daily life. One example
among several is “A Bushranging”, in which a walk
through the bush, which provides delighted enjoyment of the
beauties of nature, culminates in arrival at a clearing:
Lo! See yon bush clearing, its aspect how cheering!
Where Industry toils, and fresh gardens do grow:
The axe still resounding, hard labour abounding,
While bushmen exult o’er the forest laid low.
Each scene of work, including the hard physical effort and
the threat of despair, is an instance of
“Industry” in action, progressively actualising in
the present moment the imagined future form of the new
nation.
Throughout his life, Golder elaborated the ideas which he
set out for the first time in his published poetry in
“Stanzas, Written while on the Voyage”,
demonstrating that his endorsement of the principles
underpinning the Wakefield plan for New Zealand was one
expression of deeply anchored ideas and convictions.Each subsequent volume includes at least
one major poem on these themes. See James Belich, Making New Zealanders. A History of the New
Zealanders From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the
Nineteenth Century, (Auckland: Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd,
1966), pp. 301, 310-311, on what he terms “crusader
poetry”.
The fact that he published this poem
without critical comment twelve years after it was written,
during which time the Wakefield colonists had suffered many
challenges,Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience, pp. 367-70, and Golder,
Pigeon’s Parliament,
pp. 87-94.
indicates that it stood as a testimony
to what Golder accepted as the benevolent aims of the
Wellington settlement and to his own deeply held beliefs about
New Zealand’s potential as the place and nation in which
a future form of civilised society and humanity,
beyond the contemporary achievements of British
civilisation, could ultimately be realised.
Conclusion
Golder would not expect a case to be made for him as a
uniquely significant founder of New Zealand literature and
culture, but he would be gratified by the commemorative
recognition that his work articulates a model of citizenship
and nationality which remains at the core of what continues to
evolve as “New Zealand culture”, specifically in
that dimension signified by the term Pakeha and the formation
of a distinctive variant of English.Trumpener writes of Scotland in a way which has much
resonance for an appreciation of Golder’s position and
achievement: “Scotland’s Scottishness remains
protected in Scots: a culture lives on in
language. . . . Literature, then, has several compensatory or
repository functions. Its timeliness, its link to its own time
and place, would give it a tragic frailty, were it not that it
can survive, in fragmentary or transmuted form, into the next
stage of national evolution, to serve both as an historical
record of the past and as a foundation for the nation’s
future writing” (Bardic Nationalism,
p. 74).
It is not modesty, but a democratic
conception of society and the role of the creative,
knowledgable and virtuous individual in its progressive
improvement, which governs his self-conception and the claims
he makes about the value of both his poetry and his physical
labour in the conversion of the New Zealand wilderness for
inclusive sociable and humane purposes. A national literature
will create a shared idea of that nation in the minds of its
people by articulating what is common in experience and
purpose, and by critiquing behaviour and ideas which
compromise the creation of that nation. A national poet will
write songs for people to sing together, poems which promote
true values by satirising individuals and common types of
behaviour, and poems envisaging the future which, by binding
together imagination and the realm of ideas, can inspire the
progressive enactment of the idea of the nation through
individual and collective effort in a specific time and
place. Much of what Golder imagined on behalf of his
contemporaries and future generations of New Zealanders has
come to pass; more particularly, his progressive orientation
towards the future, grounded in scientific knowledge and a
democratic conception of the value of human effort, and his
conviction that New Zealand could lead the world as a modern
nation remain fundamental tenets in much Pakeha thinking and
government policy at the beginning of the twenty-first
century.