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dilemma of an English teacher cursed with a sense of relevance. But in
sad contrast to Williams's genuine historical engagement, Green's forays
into cultural psychology are, as Jay Gatsby put it, "merely personal." At
the outset he describes three categories of temperament (Faustian,
Erasmian, Calvinist), then relentlessly imposes them upon a random,
unchronological sequence of both men and cities -- Norman Mailer's
New York, for example, Goethe's Weimar, Castro's Havana. His autobio·
graphical chapters, like his presentations of cities, survey only books and
readings; nowhere does his sense of subject include aspects of life beyond
his categories or beyond literary culture -- the impressions of
things
(a
word Green uses simply as an abstraction) are missing entirely from a
book about cities. In his vision there are no buildings, factories, stones,
or smoke, no artifacts of urbanity at all, only sketchy collections of
temperament.
Raymond Williams also begins with books and universities, but as
he looks quickly at first classical, then Renaissance versions of pastoral
poetry, it becomes plain that one major target of his castigation is to be
just such an incomplete idea of literature as Green represents. "It is time
this bluff was called," he says roughly of academics who admire uncriti–
cally a poem like Ben Jonson's
To Penshurst.
Renaissance pastoral
excises the "living tensions" between pain and pleasure, loss and content–
ment found in Greek and Roman poets, "until there is nothing counter–
vailing, and selected images stand as themselves: not in a living but in an
enamelled world." In his contempt for the ornamental nymphs and
dryads of this enameled world, Williams can remind us of an earlier
critic's scorn for the untruthfulness of pastoral: in the "long train of
mythological imagery, such as a College easily supplies," wrote Samuel
Johnson of
Lycidas,
there is "no nature, for there is no truth." "Where
there is leisure for fiction there is little grief." Like Johnson, Williams
establishes his judgments of literature in this book primarily upon its
truthfulness, by which he seems to mean its willingness to include the
harsh facts of what the country was really like. Phrases like "the real
record," "the real connections," "the true history," "what in fact
happened" pepper his book, forming a sometimes savage counterpull to
the irresponsibilities of vitiated or academic literature. A quarrelsome
compassion enters his estimates of writers like Robert Bloomfield, an
early nineteenth-century farmboy and cobbler whose talents were frus–
trated by genteel standards. And in tracing the dissolution of pastoral
falsifications from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries he some–
what defiantly builds up a special tradition in English literature, a
pantheon that includes Bloomfield, Stephen Duck, the "thresher poet,"
