Counter-Pastoral

The Country and the City.
by Raymond Williams.
Oxford University Press. 335 pp. $9.75.

Early in The Country and the City Raymond Williams quotes a couplet by George Crabbe (from The Village, 1783):

No longer truth, though shown
   in verse, disdain,
But own the Village Life a life
   of pain.

The lines—written during the modern world's most transforming experience, the English Industrial Revolution—are an apology for pastoral poetry's idyllic picture of the countryside. What so outraged Crabbe—and one may substitute Williams here—was the “escalator” effect of literature in its nostalgic glances toward the land as Eden. “Escalator,” because for each writer looking back to a happier time there has always been someone a generation earlier who saw those same years as hard, and who then proceeded to look back through another deluding mist to his own bucolic youth; until, backward in time, beyond Hesiod, we reach the top (or bottom) floor of, indeed, Eden.

It is not Williams's point that country life has always been less than perfect bliss, though surely that is true. He asserts, rather, that the picture of a Utopia in Nature has been “a myth functioning as a memory,” conjuring up false Golden Ages in the past. And, to the extent that contemporary conditions warp our view of the past, they prevent us from dealing honestly with and improving the present. In The Country and the City Williams explores the images of the rural and urban worlds in English literature since the 16th century and shows how certain ones have persisted while others have changed. His literary examples and observations tend to support his historical interpretation: that there has been no boundary line, no sharp dichotomy between town and country; that capitalism—“the cruel economy”—did not come from the outside and destroy a manorial Utopia presided over by benevolent “rural patrons,” but that the seeds of urbanism and commercialism were sown by the rural aristocracy itself.

In the 16th century, early mercantile enclosures were launching that process of depopulation which by the 19th century had created a large industrial labor force. Williams shows how this great change affected literature: the pastoral idyllic escape was transposed to a nonexistent world—sometimes in the past, sometimes not—where there could be no “cruel tension” between two aspects of reality, as there had been earlier, even as far back as Virgil, or Hesiod. Writers, on the whole, refused to accept the actual causes and conditions of change, especially the role of the country aristocracy. As Williams puts it:

. . . A fault can . . . occur in the whole ordering of a mind. Defense of a “vanishing countryside”—“the open air,” “the life of the fields”—can become deeply confused with that defense of the old rural order which is in any case being expressed by the landlords, the rentiers, and their literary sympathizers. A physical hatred of the noise and rush of the city can be converted . . . to a powerful but acrid vision of the metropolis reclaimed by the swamp and the reappearance of a woodland feudal society.

The country thus became Eden, modernity was rejected, and, ultimately, allusions to a Golden Age served to justify the existing social order.

This continued, Williams shows, into the 18th century. By then, however, the spirit of the middle classes had pervaded England's countryside to such an extent that to praise an unreal natural world while at the same time defending its proprietors in the real one, poetry had to jettison the aristocratic order and welcome the one scientifically landscaped by the technical and improvement-oriented bourgeoisie. With Pope, for example, there is the “creation rather than the celebration of Nature.”

But soon Williams sees poetry taking another direction with the emergence of what he calls “transitional man.” In the work of writers like Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others there now appears a sense of Romantic loss. Where before the poet had looked at the countryside and seen “Ye country houses and Retreat,/Which all the happy Gods so Love,” now the poet looks at the landscape and sees a desert: “Creation is ‘stinted,’ the brook is ‘choked,’ the cry of the bittern is ‘hollow,’ and the lapwing's cries ‘unvaried.’” As Williams explains it, since the 16th century the “social condition of poetry” had been to give a false picture of contemporary life by employing idyllic tones of the past. The newer poets, however, not only write of a perfect past which never existed, they do so with a tragic sense of loss, since they have seen the cottages and fields of their childhood destroyed by the backlash of the improving spirit. Thus the tradition of the “counter-pastoral” is created. Even when, with Wordsworth and John Clare, there comes an affirmation of a living “Humanity” existing within the landscape of loss, it is made by a turning inward into the “Eden of the heart.” Escape is still into that untouchable Nature, but now it is recognized as being someplace within ourselves, and in our spiritual community with others. By the 19th century the community that Williams as political economist and sociologist so desperately wants to see achieved is yearned for, but it is not yet located in the real world.

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For most men, the “real world” would mean the city; the symbol of capitalist production, labor, domicile, exploitation—itself symbolized by the novel. The city altered men's relationship to men and to things, and it altered, therefore, the ways in which men expressed themselves. It forced upon the writer the consciousness of largeness, variety, velocity, and their inevitable counterpoint, loneliness. It is in the novels of the city that the dark back of the mirror of country life is held up. With Dickens and Hardy, and later with Wells and Joyce, there is the same sense that came to Wordsworth and Clare; a feeling of possible harmony, an intimation of imminent community among the isolated and populous souls. But now it is no longer a case of country versus city, of good versus evil, but of the modern world. Or, of the world-to-be.

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Williams's historical viewpoint, fused out of the materials of an immensively impressive knowledge of literature, a personal commitment, and a sophisticated sort of impressionism, is similar to that of the most respectable social and economic historians of England, men like R. H. Tawney and others who rely for their evidence less on belles-lettres and more on manorial records, game-preserve records, the prices of timber, grains, beer, bread. To the extent that Williams extends their argument, with evidence from the history of literature, he does a great service. His work is especially valuable as an antidote to those writers of today who continue to regard the city and technology as synonymous with evil and still search for a mythical ideal in the hills and woodlands and rivers and valleys; these writers refuse to see the countryside, as Williams does, as part of the total system of work, prices, and wages.

But in his search for a real community which will combine the most democratic elements of town and country—progress with personal concern—Williams is also something of a romantic. He is, in fact, himself a microcosm of the history he writes about. He was born and grew up in the country, and, as a young man, went to Cambridge, where he learned “culture”—a discipline, a way of life, usually considered urban. Williams knows first-hand the experience of the transitional man (it was the subject of his excellent work, Culture and Society)—the agony of separation from roots, the conflict of values, the hesitant (and certainly guilt-provoking) adoption of urban ways, the sense of loss of the past. Williams knows more of the countryside than Jane Austen did, more than George Eliot; yet, being an academic, caught in the border-land (which also caught Hardy and Lawrence), wanting to talk about what is and what must be done, he is forced, still, to rely on just what the countryman in him mocks: “sociology.”

The result is that The Country and the City is two books: an excellent one about literature and ideas, and a smaller sociological one that is jargon-laden and not so good. The irony is that the conclusions drawn from knowledgeable insights in the one lead to romantic oversights in the other (or even more paradoxically, the reverse: the romantic impulse leads to excellent scholarship). Thus, when Williams talks of the creation of a new world, a better community, “directness,” “connection,” “mutuality,” “sharing,” of life as an integrated, organic whole, what he does in effect is to create a counter-pastoral of his own. And as for the practical means of achieving his hoped-for community—one which will combine the “evergreen” with the factory—the suggestions he offers are so vague as to be nearly meaningless. There is, in fact, more than a trace in all this of what has come to be considered a peculiarly American malaise: intellectual anti-intellectualism. It is, in a way, refreshing to spot it in a brilliant and intellectually rigorous Cantabrigian.