Reading ‘The Philosophy of Love’ in Wellington in 1869

Golder’s choice of a title is deliberate and helps to locate him with some precision in the progressive intellectual and religious culture of lowland Protestant Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century. I have argued elsewhere that Golder is a local exponent of a distinctively Scottish intellectual, religious and cultural movement represented by the writings of the Rev Thomas Dick;⁵ the panorama as a new media form emphasising public information, education and entertainment attracted Dick’s attention and clearly exemplifies key principles in his thought, and can be read as a contemporary correlative in a different medium of Golder’s poetic work.

The programme for the reading is set out in the Evening Post advertisement as follows: page 15

Illustration 1: Advertisement for Golder’s public reading. Evening Post, 8 June 1869, 3

The poem is intended to provide religious, moral and practical instruction through realistic examples and the narrator’s commentary on them; the goal of the instruction is the reader’s forming a true understanding of the meaning of love and the challenges to the fulfilment of love produced by the world as it is. Reading poetry of this kind is strongly contrasted to being ‘Well read in Novels’ or reading ‘French romance’, which are ‘heart-inspiring’ but ‘unqualified by sober truth!’⁶

While the reporter is clearly engaged in caricature, his verbal description of Golder’s appearance is consistent with a photograph taken not long before the reading (see illustration 2). Lacking any other evidence, the caricature of the audience can also be assumed to provide a glimpse of Golder’s small audience. Overall, this account of the reading is an unqualified expression of violated literary and aesthetic expectations; because the difference between Milton’s epic style and Golder’s plain style is unmistakeable, the critique has to be primarily an attack on what the reporter perceives to be the utter pretension of Golder’s claim, signified by his putting on a public reading, to be a poet to be taken seriously by his community.⁸ Since two of his publications are named in the advertisement, the reporter’s reference to just one volume has to be disparaging.

Treating the reading as an embodied text brings a different kind of attention to it than was available to the reporter, for whom Golder’s bodily and vocal presentation singularly fails to conform to a high-cultural conception of the poet and poem. In his decision to present his poem through a medium constituted by his personal presence in the public space of the lecture room, rather than in the abstractness of print, Golder immediately and unavoidably ties the poem to its social and singular personal origins. The photographic portrait and its satiric reflection also have the effect of underpinning Golder’s enactment of the character of the democratic poet in his public performance of his work. This poetic character has its roots in a distinctively Scottish conception of the democratic poet which originated in James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771-74) to which Golder affirmed his allegiance in his first New Zealand volume, The New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852). Golder’s claim to be a poet as it is enacted in his reading collides with the reporter’s conception of a modality of performance grounded in a literary and linguistic education for which Milton’s poetry continued to provide the standard of aesthetic judgment and achievement. It is particularly notable that a key issue in Scottish literary education from the later page 19 eighteenth century is raised here with such directness. Golder’s voice-in-print is English, but his embodied voice is lowland Scots and it marks him as outside the English-language British literary establishment. However much he had educated himself in modern knowledge, he had not learned (whether because he lacked opportunity or because of a nationalistic principle) to shape his speech in conformity with English rules for elocution.⁹

The satirical wit and vigour of the review is in itself highly entertaining, but what is more significant here is the difficulty the reporter finds in categorising the event. Because the words were presented in verse, however uncomfortable the reporter felt about terming it a poem, the term lecture also seemed quite inappropriate; but this term points to the poem’s instructive purpose. Golder’s poem, in other words, seeks to embody in the one form features which, for the reporter, are characteristic of different media forms with distinctively different purposes and social occasions. Ironically, the reporter’s satirical analogy with a political meeting places the reading in a democratic context of political rather than poetic discourse.

In response to this critique, Golder printed an extended discussion in his preface to the poem, noting that he had composed a letter in reply which had not been published. While the reporter seems to mean by ‘caricatured’ that Golder’s poem is a degraded version of an original—Paradise Lost—Golder takes it to mean plagiarised and so a challenge to the originality of his poem. He records a question which occurred to him when copying his poem, and his response: ‘What, if I should be blamed for borrowing from Milton? This rather startled me. I immediately took down his works to make search; but at this time failed in finding what I sought’. The report ‘made me search his works more earnestly, to see what grounds there were for such an accusation; at length, I found about the end of Book VIII. of Paradise lost [sic] the place, to which our critic must have referred, and saw, to my surprise and delight, we only painted the same picture from different points of observation’.¹¹ Since Golder believed that the source of the motivation to write poetry was a divinely-given talent, his reading of ‘caricatured’ as page 21 ‘plagiarised’ signals the importance of his claim to a kind of equality with Milton—they ‘painted the same picture’ from different view-points—and his displacement of the report’s scheme of evaluation, in which Milton’s poem is the original and Golder’s is a poor repetition, by the grounding of the originality of his poem in himself and his specific perspective in time and place. Something more of the denigratory force of ‘caricatured’ can be inferred from a paraphrase of ‘caricature’ given by Dick in a different context, of Biblical interpretation: ‘to twist it from its precise and sublime references, to accord with the vague fancies of injudicious minds’.¹²

Golder also accuses his critic of ignorance, being one of those ‘who may have no farther knowledge of [Milton’s] works, than what they have seen, of extracts, in their school-books’.¹³ What Golder’s self-justification shows us is that Milton’s Paradise Lost is a conventional part of a basic literary education, even if the poem is not read as a whole. We might also infer from both the critic’s journalistic commentary and the poet’s prefatory address to his readers that Milton’s poem had become so naturalised in literate British knowledge that it could inform any writing on literary, religious, philosophical and moral themes. In particular, Golder had a copy at home, by which he could compare his writing with Milton’s and settle to his own satisfaction how close the two poems were in their content and expression.