Variations for oaten flute
Roy Fuller
The Penguin Book of English pastoral. Verse Edited by John 13arrell and John Bull (Allen Lane &LOCI)
Penguin anthologies, in their proliferation, haven't always stuck to strictly sensible themes e.g. 'Sick Verse', 'Poetry of the Forties', categories respectively vague and non-significant. Nor have the themes always been rigorously delineated: 'Socialist Verse' seemed really to be verse by socialists or even lapsed socialists. It was no doubt inevitable that sooner or later 'English Pastoral Verse' would arrive. The theme is certainly intellectually viable but my heart sank rather at the prospect of leafing through shepherds' dialogues, songs about supine milkmaids, praise of ale, and so forth. Even remembering Empson, the ideological uses of pastoral are not all that attractive, either: the arcadia of artifice or nostalgia doesn't promise great reward for the sol3histicated and reconciled urbanite.
The actual article, however, is a distinct, success. It can perhaps be best described as a copiously illustrated thesis. John Barrel! and John Bull (apparently not, as one might think, norns de guerre) are university lecturers in English. In addition to contributing a general introduction, they preface each section of the anthology (it is chronological) with an introduction to the period covered. These remarks, mainly of a socio-historico-literary kind, are closely argued, even dogmatic. The narration of literary and other events is couched in the present tense, often a sign of the imposition of theory on historical and sociological matters, and the argument, particularly in the earlier stages, is sometimes neither wholly convincing nor wholly lucid. Here is a sentence from the discussion of Jonson's The Sad Shepherd: And in this way the sense of an old style of shepherd unequipped to deal with the demands of a changing style of agriculture is matched precisely by our sense of the inadequacy of the old pastoral conventions to deal with this sort of intrusion of reality.
We perhaps feel that working out the negatives isn't going to reward us with much greater insight into the sample offered. Moreover, starting with the Elizabethan pastoral does inevitably bring in initially those bucolic properties that with Lucky Jimian impatience we may find tedious Barnabe Googe, 'Shepherd Tonie', et al. But if the reader begins with the next section, 'The Pastoral Drama', surely he can't but be interested and led on. Here is Daniel and Fletcher and Jonson and the obscure Joseph Rutter (fl. 1635). Against the extracts from these dramatists and from the anonymous Sir Clyomon and Clamdyes, and in the light' of the editors' prefatory words, the pages from As You Like It, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest come up with fresh significance.
There is no doubt that though the editors are extremely sparing of aesthetic comment they have rarely included material simply to bear out their arguments: the vast bulk of it is worth reading for its own sake, though, as in the case of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, it gains greatly from being seen in the context of the editors' introductions and the rest of the poetry. Quite a lot of the anthology was new to me. For instance, I'd never read John Philips's Cyder, so that marvellous early eighteenth century phrases like "whilst English plains/Blush with pomaceous Harvests" and autumn "intenerating milky Grain" gently removed the top of my head. (In the middle of the century Christopher Smart somewhat overdoes the thing: Or plough Tunbridgia's salutiferous hills Industrious, and with draughts chalybiate heal'd . .) Richard Jago's 'The Scavengers' (1784) was unknown as far as I was concerned: Gaffer Pestel and his wife, Beckett-like private refuse collectors, lament the decline of muck in Warwick. How had one come to miss the funny eclogue on the railways by Walter Savage Landor? And so on. In other words, this is that quite rare kind, the creative anthology, and its fate may well be to become a text book.
Eden "contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. .. yet. . . this image of Nature as Paradise ... has continued to haunt the imagination of Man." The paradox, say the editors, has given rise to most of the poetry here anthologised; and they add that the "availability of tile pastoral myth, to describe quite different sorts of changes in social organisa
tion, is one of the most important reasons for its _perpetuation long after the passing of the particular circumstances which had first called it into existence." It may be objected that it is stretching too tenuously the concept of pastoral to make it cover, for example, both the courtier's longing for the innocence and honesty of the country, and the wage-labourer looking back to the idyllic days of pre-capitalist farming. But one doesn't really feel anything strained or unnatural about this anthology, which in fact takes us right down to Hardy and Yeats. Indeed, the editors seem, if anything, to get clearer and more interesting as the years advance see, for instance, their remarks on Goldsmith and Clare and the Corn and Game Laws; and their final page on the contemporary situation of pastoral (though the latter takes too little account of the legitimate nostalgia for craftsmanship and corporate life in the country felt by many now merely in their sixties). The editors convince us that though the pastoral themes are simple they are thereby all the more apt to be richly and effectively counterpointed by history and the individual poetic talent. They even have a section labelled 'Some Versions of the anti-Pastoral', where poets, from farm-labourer Stephen Duck to the Chartist Ebenezer Elliott, set out to tell the sober truth about the countryside, and this, too,, is illuminated by the myths.
I should say that the spelling is unmodernised. To begin with I wondered about this though in the end the decision convinced me (but all the more reason for the non-specialist reader skipping, pro tem, the first section). There is a useful and restrained marginal gloss: a little more information could, however, have been advantageously given, e.g. the supplying of some asterisked names. Perhaps it would have been asking too much for a bibliography of sources, though many will be encouraged to pursue a particular poet. The editors have lavished some excellent prose quotations both in the text and as epigraphs before the sections; Thomas Tickell, in 1713, put the initial point of this review rather more amusingly: "In looking over some English Pastorals a few Days ago, I perused at least fifty lean Flocks, and reckoned up an hundred left-handed Ravens, besides blasted Oaks, withering Meadows, and Weeping Deities". I thought the typography attractive and the jacket (which will presumably form the cover of the paperback) a brainwave.
Roy Fuller has been Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford
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