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may be less "imaginative" than are the scientific hypotheses they
are designed to displace. The sexual hierarchies in the writings of
Marcuse and Mailer derive from an aesthetic that can pretend to be
embattled while actually being wholly uninstructed by science.
Theirs is an ultimate pastoralism and, like other presumably hu–
manistic attitudes derived from literature, is probably a disservice
to the ordinary conduct of life. "Pastoral" and "literary" are of
course wildly elusive terms, but some stability might be given
them by a preliminary illustration from
The Faerie Queene.
In Book II Guyon descends into the Cave of Mammon. The
Cave has ascribed to it the horrors of an industrial factory as well
as the blandishments of finance capitalism. It is filled with trea–
sure, with currency that reproduces itself without ever contributing
to the growth of things other than money. Investment of this
kind, money begetting money, is seen as a violation of nature, a
perversion of which Volpone will later be guilty when, in the
opening lines of Jonson's play, he compares the powers of gold to
the generative influence of the sun. Guyon is there bribed with
worldly grandeur and riches if he will swear loyalty to Queen
Philotim~,
thereby betraying his allegiance to Gloriana, the queen
associated with the old codes of chivalry, the open fields and
virgin lands where heroic exploits are still possible. He is in effect
asked to join the new world of progress in the same canto in which
Elizabeth is reminded by the long chronology of the kings of
England that her legitimacy depends on her ties to the antique
past. The choice allowed Guyon was of course no longer available
even to Spenser: the industrial, capitalistic possibility had become
a visible fact in the emerging shape of English and of modern
society . Spenser makes clear that Guyon is out of phase, that the
whole poem is "antique," a mirror of a past which is even then an
imaginary one, a faery land.
The significance is marvelously wrought into the texture of
the poem, with complications that make it more alive for us polit–
ically than the topical political allegory alone would suggest. Some
of this significance is eloquently caught by R. H. Tawney in
Reli–
gion and the Rise of Capitalism.
In the passage that follows one
can see how images which even in literature are dependent for
verification only on other literary works and conventions, images
