BOOKS
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best subject in the best way) ... The effect was in some degree to
combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was
made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the
society he lived in. "But this device is capable of almost endless variation
as Mr. Empson is quick to suggest: one may get heroic pastoral or mock
pastoral, each of which is itself capable of a good many variations; or
the whole bag of pastoral tricks may be shifted from simple country
people to children, workers, gangsters, in short anyone who can be
thought of as standing outside the contemporary ethos, as not, in the
hairy ape's phrase, "belonging."
Now it is certainly true that what we ordinarily think of as proletarian
literature almost invariably uses this device in one form or another. Mr.
Empson's remarks on "the realistic sort of pastoral," for example, fit
Studs Lonigan
perfectly : "So far as the person described is outside
society because too poor for its benefits he is independent, as the artist
claims to be, and can be a critic of society; in so far as he is forced by
this into crime he is the judge of the society which judges him. This is
a source of irony both against him and against the society, and if he is
a sympathetic criminal he can be made to suggest both Christ as the
scapegoat (so invoking Christian charity) and the sacrificial tragic
hero...."
The trouble with pastoral in this sense as a definition of proletarian
literature is that it is quite as good as a definition of contemporary litera–
ture in general; for nearly everything from
The Magic Mountain
to
To
Have and To Have Not
is pastoral in Mr. Empson's sense. In other
words, Mr. Empson is defining, not a genre, but one of the fundamental
devices of literature, and the only device which makes possible the
particular use of literature with which our own age is most concerned.
Once this fact is clear-and in his tangential way Mr. Empson makes it
clear by including in his essay on "Proletarian Literature" everyone from
Faulkner to Gertrude Stein-the importance of
English Pastoral Poetry
becomes evident, and the reader, having discounted Mr. Empson's
per–
sona,
is ready for the series of essays which follow on the various uses of
the pastoral device in other ages.
It would be difficult, I think, to overestimate the value of these
essays; each of them constitutes a set of notes for a history of the
literature of the period
it
deals with. Indeed, one will learn more about
the Elizabethan Drama from Mr. Empson's essay on Double Plots than
can be learned from any of the standard histories of the subject. The
essays on "They that have power to hurt and will do none" and
Marvell's "Garden" are not, perhaps, so striking; this sort of analysis
of Shakespeare and Marvell has been done before, though never, I
think, with such skill as Mr. Empson shows. The essay on
The Beggars'
Opera,
on the other hand, makes the full meaning of Gay's marvelous
mock-pastoral available to an audience, probably for the first time
since Gay's own day. Mr. Empson completely justifies his bland but
devastasting remark that "it is a fine thing that the play is still popular,
however stupidly it is enjoyed."
