A little Lerner
Richard Luckett
The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry Laurence Lerner (Chatto and Windus £3).
The question of pastoral can hardly be called new. Although of all literary genres it might seem to be the least inherently interesting, it has been the subject of continual debate since the Renaissance, debate culminating in William Empson's assurance that if we thought pastoral was about shepherds we were wrong, since its essential characteristic is in fact a contrast. Thus The Beggar's Opera and Alice in Wonderland both become versions of pastoral, by virtue of their implicit contrast with the worlds of authority and adulthood respectively. Now Professor Lerner advances the theory that " nostalgia is the basic emotion of pastoral," and goes on to consider a number of characteristics of pastoral, and of works which relate to the pastoral tradition, in the light of this dictum.
The Professor, however, is soon in difficulty. His prOblem is not merely that he seems unable to decide where the territories of Arcady end — though his notions of this would make many a simple rustic scratch his head — but that having arrived there he sounds as though he would much rather be somewhere else. He is, for example,lri unable to get his quotations right; neither Jonson nor Milton are spared, and he even manages a couple of errors in "The glories of our blood and state." The reader is likely to take this as symptomatic of wool-gathering, and closer examination, will prove him correct, Take the conclusion to an elaborate comparison between Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts: "It is a bitterer book than The Catcher." For a moment we are inclined to nod in agreement at this sage judgement, delivered with all the gravity of some shepherd Nestor pronouncing on the immutability of seasonal change; then we wake up to the ludicrous truism that it in fact is. As an opinion it is quite superfluous, being manifestly obvious, and it lacks, moreover, any relevance to the matter in hand: did it really take a book on pastoral to tell us this?
There are moments when this tendency to maunder seems the one unifying element in the book. It comes in various forms: "I have had a good deal to say on the ingenuity of Renaissance literature in avoiding radical implications," Professor Lerner tells us, with more than a little justice, and it is done with such conviction that it is some time before it dawns on us that the difficulty is purely of his own making, and that the writers he discusses had probably never thought of the implications that he depicts them as so cunningly circumventing. Indeed it often seems that the Professor does not derive his arguments from any study of the literature, but endeavours instead simply to use the literature as a quarry for examples. Out of this comes the extraordinary statement that "Marvel! always lets us dawn when we ask for a clear preference; but though his choice may elude us, he had, I hope, made the contrast itself plainer "; it is equally the origin of the splendid pronouncement that " Sannazaro knew that he was no Robert Frost, and had no wish to be taken for one." We feel no surprise when a chapter on Spencer ends with ' a disquisition, interesting if not in the least convincing, on the 'trite ' quality of pat poet's verbal command. Retournons d Aos moutons? -hardly, with Profp'ssOr,'L,erner around. This is a pity, „and for two reasons. In the first place P'rskfessor .Lerner, although he isn't much interested inpiastoral or if he is, cannot decide why this siliould be So, orif, has things of value to sax', He can be excruciatingly offhind, as in his description of a passage„)from Join as "creepy Poetry "; he canitequally prove acute and clear-headed, as his reflections on the concept of ' evidence ' in psycho-analysis, and on the Leavisite confusion between the health of a literature and the health of a society, demonstrate. His problem is that of harnessing what he has to say with what he is ostensibly talking about, and the consequent confusion wouldn't be so serious if it were not for the fact that he is a Professor of English. Demands for relevance' and the rest threaten to make the English schools the chosen folds for those who want to be told what they want to be told, or want to say what they want to say, the facts of the case notwithstanding. But literature is not a vehicle for whatever can be read into it, nor are the groves of Academe at all the same thing as the groves of Arcady, however similar the bleats of the occupants. Professor Lerner's methods contribute to the illusion, even if his content sometimes points in quite another direction.
Secondly, many of the questions asked or suggested are not at all boring. Is nostalgia the basis of pastoral? If it is, what does it tell us about the genre? It is certainly the predominant emotion in, say, the novels of Virginia Woolf (though the Professor misses this particular discursion) and it creates a very curious critical problem there. Arcadia, Eden, Utopia: are these in any way the same? Lerner sharply and correctly differentiates Utopia, but he seems to confuse the Pan-governed, populated world of Arcadia and the empty ,Eden where the solitary, type of Jehovah walked. Nor does he really distinguish between the literary nature of Arcadia, and the mythic quality of Eden; the exclusion from the garden, emotionally apprehended, can cause a present pain that no playful conjurings with Arcady suggest — except perhaps in Poussin's painting, where the two worlds have become one. Why did the form die? Lerner is at his best when writing on Arnold's Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy, and on the way in which, in the latter poem, it is difficult to say whether the poem is pastoral poetry or is about pastoral poetry. But he misses the point that the decline of pastoral poetry has been coincident with the disappearance of the shepherd life that, in however idealised a form, it described. When Aubrey or Dorothy Osborne wrote of real shepherds or milkmaids their descriptions tallied, in an approximate way, with the tradition. Doctor Johnson postulated a close connection between pastoral poetry and 'rustic life.' The existence of the modern Damon, who watches television, travels his field by car or motorbike, and is an authority on the life-cycle of the liver-fluke, has yet to be treated of in any memorable literary work. Where (to mix a metaphor in a way that will become second nature to anyone who reads Professor Lerner's book) is your theory of alternative societies, or of nostalgia, if it transpires that pastoral poetry came to its Cannae at Cold Comfort Farm?
Richard Luckett iS a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge.
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