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lite rary and po liti cal, and that if it is to be call ed radical it is also
culturall y co nservative. The movement of th e passage from
Tawney, as much as its argument, testifies to the power of
Spenser. Literature and art are evoked as if these were the embodi–
ment of what is lost and might be recove red, or better yet of what
has been buried by the accretions of capitalism and its technol–
ogies. But if, in emul at ion o f Spenser, the literatu re of the past is
brought forward by Tawney to register a reaction agains t the be–
gi11l1ings of the modern wo rld, it is well to rememb er that neither
Dante nor Spenser tho ught that in propos in g an alternative they
were descri bing a real possib iIi ty. Indeed the wri ters of fiction to
whom I allude here are often more tough-minded abo ut the un–
reality of the pastoral alternative, more aware o f its primarily
literary ex iste nce, th an are most historical and political theorists, a
fact of which Tawney was well aware.
In propos ing some measure by which to criti cally place the
rise of finance cap italism , Spenser, and J onson a fter him, are nec–
essarily allusive to literature and to the myth s and metaphors it
provides. There is noth ing else they could allude or po int to. By
the time of Spenser, in fact, the older social order was already so
fast dis appearing th at it co uld be said to ex is t only
in
the forms of
art. Indeed as a general rule it seems as if vita l orderings of life
become co difi ed into literary mytho logies onl y after they have
lost their most pervas ive and unselfconscious power ove r daily
existence. As Tawney puts it quite aptl y, "the practical implica–
tions of t he social th eory of the Middl e Ages are stated more
clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, because
they are stated with th e emphas is of a creed that is menaced."
Spenser's poem is asse rtively litera ry, assert ively antique in its
language , whi ch was meant to be remote eve n fo r Spenser's con–
temporaries. Perh aps this mak es of Spenser, and of art, what
Marcuse likes to think it is : a realm apart from the eros ions of
time and th erefore a "great negation" of the existing social order.
This is a possibility to consid er late r on . For the moment it is
worth noticing that Tawney compli cates such a culturally elitist
view of art by say ing that while the figure be hind the genii of
beauty was "murky" it was also "indispensable." Exploitative cap–
italism, th at is, sub sid ized th e en capsul a ti o n o f an alternative
