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1
THE CALL FOR A MODERN PASTORAL
âShepherds were the men who pleasâd me first,â Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude, claiming for these shepherds a greater vivifying influence in the world of his time than could be exerted by those mythical herdsmen of the golden age of Saturn or those of the Arcadian tradition transmitted by the ancient poets (8:182â85). Thus at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth carried on the centuries-old debate over whether pastoral should imitate golden-age shepherds, as the neoclassic critics maintained, or whether it should imitate real English shepherds, as the rationalistic school insisted.1
Typically the neoclassic position in the dispute over pastoral dovetails with the appeal to classical authority in the larger quarrel between ancients and moderns. The two disputes are clearly joined by Pope, who subscribes to the ârulesâ for pastoral that are derived from the practice of Theocritus and Virgil. âAmong moderns,â he points out in his âDiscourse on Pastoral,â âtheir success has been the greatest who have most endeavourâd to make these ancients their pattern.â Thus in his own pastorals he proposes to confine himself to those subjects âwhich the Critics upon Theocritus and Virgil will allow to be fit for pastoralâ (1:32).
Rationalist critics disputed this rule for pastoral poets, prescribing that they take the ancients as their âpatternâ and claiming greater merit for the modern pastoral of Ambrose Philips than for Popeâs classical imitations. Philips had challenged the rule for golden-age shepherds by writing of English rustics in an English landscape, as well as by suggesting that Spenser was as worthy a pastoral model as Theocritus or Virgil. Concurring with this view, Addison praised Philipsâs departure from neoclassic pattern: âOne would have thought it impossible for this kind of poetry to have subsisted without fawns and satyrs, wood-nymphs and water-nymphs, with all the tribe of rural deities. But we see he has given a new life and a more natural beauty to this way of writing by substituting in the place of those antiquated fables, the superstitious mythology which prevails among the shepherds of our own countryâ (Congleton 86).
As this debate dragged on through the eighteenth centuryâa century more remarkable for uninspired pastoral criticism than for inspired pastoral poetryâcritics frequently mingled neoclassic and rationalist criteria, demanding both classical myths and realistic imitation of life, or else demanding golden-age shepherds living in Arcadian tranquility and wishing to see these ideals verified by contemporary experience.2 Of course, such requirements were not easily met, especially in an England whose smoke-belching factories were encroaching on the green countryside. Not surprisingly, a reviewer of Gessnerâs popular idylls in 1789 pointed to Switzerland as unsurpassed in Europe for nourishing the poetâs imagination with ârural imagesâ: âWhere peace, innocence, and contentment reign, there may one realize the pleasing fictions of the golden age, and trace out with facility and truth, the simple manners of a pastoral life.â3 But what of countries where âpeace, innocence, and contentmentâ do not reign? According to this line of reasoning, such countries cannot produce pastoral poetry. Even as sophisticated a critic as Hazlitt adopted this simplistic position. In his lecture on Thomson and Cowper, he pointed out that âwe have few good pastorals in the language. Our manners are not Arcadian; our climate is not an eternal spring; our age is not the age of gold. We have no pastoral-writers equal to Theocritus, nor any landscapes like those of Claude Lorraineâ (5:98). After decades of such tedious debates, such confusion of art and its subject matter, at least one critic, Nathan Drake, drew the obvious conclusion: âIf rural life no longer present us with shepherds singing and piping for a bowl or a crook, why persist, in violation of all probability, to introduce such characters? If pastoral cannot exist without them, let us cease to compose itâ (225). Drake nevertheless hastened to reassure his readers that such a drastic solution was not inevitable. Even if shepherds were no longer competing for prize cupsâa scene that he claimed was for Theocritus a matter of âhourly observationââa new pastoral formula could be devised: âsimplicity in diction and sentiment, a happy choice of rural imagery, such incidents and circumstances as may even now occur in the country ⊠are all that are essential to success.â Surprisingly, he did not invoke as his modern model Wordsworthâs poems that voiced the âadmiration and the love, the life / In common thingsâ (Prelude 1:117â18)âthe Lyrical Ballads was published in the same year as Drakeâs essay on pastoral poetryâbut praised Gessnerâs Idyllen for rivaling the ancients through immortal compositions (225).
This call for a new English pastoral dealing with âcommon thingsâ was given urgency by poets and critics as the topos of the pastoral pleasance began to resonate with the pressing issue born of the French Revolution, to envision a new, ideal community, such as Coleridgeâs Pantisocracy, an experiment in human perfectibility.4 Similarly the French Revolution taught Wordsworth to recognize that his native mountain valley represented a prototypical egalitarian community. Although he claimed to be âuntaught by thinking or by books / To reason well of polity or law / And nice distinctions, then on every tongue, / Of natural rights and civilâ (Prelude 9:200â203), his conception of Cumberland village communities comes close to the patriarchal stage of social development that, in his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau called âthe happiest and most stableâ (âlâĂ©poque la plus heureuse et la plus durableâ) (72). During this stage of sociĂ©tĂ© naissante, men were content with building their own rustic huts, making their own clothes, and gathering their own food, employing only simple tools and simple skills, requiring no government since they neither owned nor coveted any property: âAs long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such crafts as did not require the joint labor of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest, and happy lives ⊠and enjoyed the delights of social intercourse between independent individualsâ (73). Precisely this ideal of Rousseauâs emergent societyâand not of a primitive state of natureâreverberates in the expressions of hope sanctioned by a âFrance standing on the top of golden hours, / And human nature seeming born againâ (Prelude 6: 353â54). Thus the paradise that Wordsworth claims as surpassing all mythical paradises is a village community of independent fellow-laborers, rather than a prelapsarian Eden or a primitive tribal group:
But lovelier far than this the Paradise
Where I was rearâd; in Natureâs primitive gifts
Favorâd no less, and more to every sense
Delicious, seeing that the sun and sky,
The elements and seasons in their change
Do find their dearest Fellow-labourer there,
The heart of Man, a district on all sides
The fragrance breathing of humanity,
Man free, man working for himself, with choice
Of time, and place, and object.âŠ
(Prelude 8:144â53)
From such an exemplary life of âsimplicity, / And beauty, and inevitable graceâ (8:1157â58), Wordsworth gained such a strong âprepossessionâ toward the ideals of the French Revolution that the revolutionary events themselves âseemâd nothing out of natureâs certain course, / A gift that rather was come late than soonâ (Prelude g:252â54).5 Out of his exploration of the psychological and social experiences that not only nourished but also threatened or contradicted his âprepossessionâ evolved the import of Wordsworthâs greatest pastoral poetryâMichael, Home at Grasmere, and the pastoral interludes in the Prelude. All these poetic achievements far outdistanced contemporary English critical descriptions and prescriptions for pastoral. For the theoretical acumen that matches Wordsworthâs poetic originality, we must look to the great German poet-critic, Friedrich Schiller, whose treatise Ăber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung LukĂĄcs called âthe first profound philosophical analysis of the essence of modern artâ (Studies in European Realism 200).
Schiller, like Wordsworth, was a seismograph for the political and social forces of his time. Far from retreating from the momentous events of the 1790s, his writings on aesthetic questions were quickened by the political tumult following the French Revolution. He firmly believed that the humanist had a role to play in counteracting the publicâs absorption in the daily sensational news of dissension and violence: he could correct the excitement of the moment by directing attention to the connection between the present and lasting human concerns. Schiller was moreover convinced, as he wrote to the Countess von Schimmelmann in November 1795, that âthe highest philosophy, like the highest morality and the highest politics, culminates in a poetic idea. It is the poetic spirit that prescribes [vorzeichnet] the idea for all three and their perfection lies in approaching this idealâ (NA 28:99). That is to say: for Schiller as for Shelley, poets not only represent the world as it is but also, and more importantly, mirror the âgigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the presentâŠ. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the worldâ (Critical Prose 35â36). Schiller had acted out of this conviction in 1794 when he founded a new journal called Die Horen (The Graces); there, among other contributions, he published in installment form his two major treatises, On the Aesthetic Education of Man and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. âAt a time when the nearby din of war alarms our country,â Schiller wrote in his prospectus for Die Horen, âwhen the clash of political opinions and interests renews this war in nearly all circles and all too frequently drives away the muses and the graces ⊠it is as bold as it is salutary to invite the distracted reader to a totally different kind of colloquy,â a colloquy aimed at liberating the reader from the narrow, divisive, and oppressive interests of the present through the higher and unifying concern with the âpurely humanâ that transcends the influence of the times (NA 22:106). By rigorously shunning political causes, by zealously eschewing current events, Schiller promised that his journal would engage in quietly laying the groundwork for those âbetter ideas, purer principles, and nobler morals, on which all true improvement of the social condition ultimately dependsâ (22:107).
Schiller was aware that his Utopian idealism was open to question. In defending his inquiry into the aesthetic education of man, he explicitly raised the issue of what it meant to be a citizen of his age (ZeitbĂŒrger) as well as a citizen of his state (StaatsbĂŒrger) (AL 2.2). And he met the issue head on: âExpectantly the gaze of philosopher and man of the world alike is fixed on the political scene, where now, so it is believed, the very fate of mankind is being debated. Does it not betray a culpable indifference to the common weal not to take part in this general debate?â (2.4). Schiller does not see his insistence on dealing with timeless and âpurely humanâ questions (NA 22:106) as evading this timely debate. On the contrary, he sees his focus on moral and aesthetic principles as his way of engaging in the debate of how to achieve âthat most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art of man: the construction of true political freedomâ (AL 2.1). He argues, further, that the problem of how to achieve political freedom in practice, in experience, must be approached through the problem of the aesthetic (2.5).
In seeking to establish the idealistic basis for this enterprise, Schiller first needed to clarify the interrelation of moral and aesthetic principles. This was no small task at a time when aesthetic theory, like political criticism, was remarkable chiefly for its conceptual confusion. In Germany, no less than in England, nearly all aesthetic judgments were flawed by what Coleridge termed the âsubstitution of assertion for argumentâ (BL 2:113). Instead of testing and correcting their feelings about works of art by appealing to principles, most criticsâso Schiller complained to the Duke of Augustenburg in 1793âtested their aesthetic judgments by appealing to their feelings (Briefe 3:249). The following year he again dwelled on the same problem when he told Goethe that if a critic sought to support his judgments through principles, he was embarrased to find that no code of law existed to which he could appeal. He had to choose between remaining silent or becoming both legislator and judge (GA 20:24). Clearly Schiller elected the second alternative in writing his literary reviews and critical essays.
Besides suffering from this general legislative confusion and prevailing anarchy in aesthetic judgments, criticism of pastoral poetry suffered even more severely than other literary genres from unresolved contradictions inherent in some eighteenth-century norms. Two widely held views of art and culture were on a collision course. On the one hand, philosophers, theologians, and poets, such as Kant, Herder, and Schillerâto name but the most obvious examplesâhad come to believe in a theory of human progress, even though they envisioned progress as not necessarily proceeding in a straight line but as involving setbacks or backward spirals as part of the forward thrust toward perfectibility. Goethe once remarked that instead of speaking of the worldâs progressiveness (Weltfortschreitung), we should speak of circumambulation (Umschreitung) (GA 22: 266). But how was this progressâno matter how roundaboutâto be squared with the claim that in the realm of literature norms were fixed once and for all by the classical models? Kant was one of the few thinkers of his time to recognize this difficulty and to solve it by distinguishing between what he saw as continual progress in scientific knowledge and a fixed plane in artistic achievement. In the Critique of Judgement he argued that âart stands still at a certain point; a boundary is set beyond which it cannot go, which presumably has been reached long ago and cannot be extended furtherâ (152).
Most literary critics, however, did not draw such a distinction between scientific progress and artistic stasis, or even acknowledge the philosophical problem that Kant thus solved. We have already seen that critical confusion led to the contradictory demands that poets should imitate Theocritus and Virgil but should, at the same time, buttress their Arcadian visions with the realistic depiction of contemporary scenes and individuals. Such a Janus-like posture is well exemplified in Winckelmannâs insistence that the only way for moderns to âbecome great, even, if possible, inimitable [unnachahmlich]â is by âimitation [Nachahmung] of the ancientsâ (1:8). This paradoxical compromise between beliefs in modern decline and modern advance brings to mind one of the clichĂ©s of the battle between ancients and moderns, that of the modern pygmies attaining new heights of cultural and artistic achievement by standing on the shoulders of the ancient giants.6 None of the major poets writing at the turn of the eighteenth century cut this Gordian knot by simply declaring the ancient models irrelevant, as some mid-twentieth-century pygmies were to do. Instead, those poet-critics who, like Schiller and the Schlegels, Coleridge and Shelley, continued to admire the classics while radically departing from them, confronted a more difficult problem: how could both classic and modern poetry be justly judged, each according to its own value? As Schiller points out, if we deduce the generic norms of poetry exclusively from the practice of the ancient poets, then nothing is easier than to disparage the moderns. But, he adds, nothing is more trivial, either (NA 20:439). Instead of pressing for a one-sided victory in this battle, Schiller gives each side its due, examining critically yet sympathetically the basis for a claim for classic perfection on the one hand and for modern perfectibility on the other. Out of this dialectical exploration emerges Schillerâs hypothesis of a possible âcoalitionâ of classic and modern. Schillerâs concept of pastoralâwhich undergoes several metamorphosesâplays a crucial part in evolving his synthesis that lies beyond the classic-modern horizons.
But here we are in danger of making Schillerâs tratise sound too programmatic. In fact, he fashioned and refashioned his conceptions of classic and modern, as well as his solutions to the contest between the two. Originally, in 1793, he planned an essay dealing exclusively with the concept of the naive. Two years elapsed, however, before he actually undertook the project. By then the naive had become the springboard for three separate essays that he eventually published as a single treatise, Ăber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung.7 In undertaking the three essays for his periodical, Die Horen, he did not have a systematic typology of poetry worked out. The first essay had much less to do with poetry than with psychological and episte-mological questions concerning manâs interest in nature. And yet, looking back on this essay with the argument of the whole treatise in mind, we can discern here the groundwork for his master concept, the dichotomy between naive and sentimental ways of feeling (Empfindungsweisen), ways of relating to the world.8 But he allowed the implications of this central dichotomy to evolve in circuitous ways without adhering to a master plan. He told his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt that the essays dealing with naive and sentimen...
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- CONTENTS
- PREFACE
- KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS
- 1. THE CALL FOR A MODERN PASTORAL
- 2. THE PASTORAL SPECTRUM: FROM ARCADIAN RHETORIC TO THE RHETORIC OF TRANSCENDENCE
- 3. âMY VALLEY BE MY WORLDâ: HOME AT GRASMERE AS A FAILED IDYLL
- 4. THE RHETORIC OF PASTORAL INSPIRATION
- 5. WORDSWORTHâS PASTORAL COVENANT
- 6. COLERIDGE IN SICILY: A PASTORAL INTERLUDE IN THE PRELUDE
- 7. THE âGOLDEN THEMEâ OF APOLLO: A PASTORAL INTERLUDE IN HYPERION
- 8. âSILENCE AND SLOW TIMEâ PASTORAL TOPOI IN KEATSâS ODES
- NOTES
- WORKS CITED
- INDEX