BOOKS
57
of view
certai~ly.
Toward the end of her narrative, she has put it simply
in this way: " ... men suffered on the land but survived; while in the
cities, they flourished-and faded(p. 734)."
Now, here is a political maxim that opens up extraordinary vistas.
It assumes that state power from time to time has fallen into the ham:!s
of merchants, bankers and
industrialist~.
But because these have never·
succeeded in institutionalizing their wealth, like the landlords, they
have come and gone; but the landlords (and the generals, who
are drawn from the same class) have always remained. And
in time they have always triumphed. The fact is, at many of the
critical periods in modern history-in the English Revolution, the
French Revolution, the American Civil War-the struggle has been
against landlordism. Contemporaneously, of course, the economic power
of landlordism does not come from rent altogether but from
rente
as
well; nevertheless a ruling class does seem to have a greater tenacity
when it is firmly rooted, institutionally and politically, in the land. The
soil, at any rate, particularly when it is associated with entail, serves as
a basis for the transmission of power. The greater strength of the English
and German ruling classes today may
be
contrasted with the weak posi–
tions of the French and the Japanese. Note also that the American ruling
class is entirely urban and to this degree anchorless.
Certainly the idea is attractive: not, of course, as a basic economic
pattern, as Miss Beard would have it; but it goes a long way in throwing
light on the ancillary problem of the sources and strength of class
political power.
LoUIS
M.
HACKER
THE TRUEST POETRIE
ENGLISH PASTORAL POETRY.
By William Empson. Norton. $2.50.
It is important that some attempt should be made by criticism to
explain the art of the past in terms of the theory which is an adequate
explanation of the art of the present; only thus can an age justify its
enjoyment of the literature of the past. It is no accident that. the age
which produced the heroic play also produced Dryden's criticism, or
that the age which, in spite of Wordsworth's qualification, persisted in
viewing literature as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
produced Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare.
The importance of
English Pastoral Poetry
is that it does for our
day something like what Dryden and Coleridge did for theirs: it deals
with the past in terms which make it available to the present. By finding
a method of analysis which brings into focus the dominant purpose of
our literature and then applying this method to the literature of other
ages, Mr. Empson frees us from the dreary necessity of justifying our
concern with past literature on no better grounds than those of historical
