The Georgic Revolution

by Anthony Low

Overview

Low discusses the courtly or aristocratic ideal as the great enemy of the georgic spirit, and shows that georgic powerfully invaded English poetry in the years from 1590 to 1700.

Originally published in 1985.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691611532
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #546
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	9.90(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.90(d)

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The Georgic Revolution

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By Anthony Low

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06643-1

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CHAPTER 1

Resistance to Georgic

In the October Eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender (1579), Spenser has Cuddie recall the Virgilian paradigm of the poet's career, the rota Vergilii, which serious poets since the Middle Ages had much admired and imitated, and on which Spenser will largely model his own career:

    Indeede the Romish Tityrus, I heare,
    Through his Mecœnus left his Oaten reede,
    Whereon he earst had taught his flocks to feede,
    And laboured lands to yield the timely eare,
    And eft did sing of warres and deadly drede,
    So as the Heavens did quake his verse to here.
    (55-60)

The pattern was still familiar in 1659, when Lovelace's translation of an epigram by Sannazaro was posthumously published:

    A Swain, Hind, Knight; I fed, till'd, did command
    Goats, Fields, my Foes; with leaves, a spade, my hand.

Of the three modes of poetry — pastoral, georgic, and epic — over which Virgil was thought to have thrown the mantle of his immense authority, pastoral was clearly the most popular in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and epic the most honored. But literary historians have found that georgic, the middle term in the series, was unaccountably absent. "Virgilian pastoral thrives," notes James Turner, "but true Georgics are hard to find." As Turner and Raymond Williams have argued and thoroughly documented, the English literary mentality during the Tudor and Stuart reigns was, on the whole, so antipathetic to manual labor and to the "base" work of husbandry that poets either scorned the agricultural laborer or, more usually, ignored him completely. In pastoral fields, lovely nymphs abound but farm laborers are apt to be banished.

Not that the English were uninterested in farming. Most of the country still made its living from the land, and a profusion of legal documents reveals that everyone from the Lord Chancellor and members of Parliament to cottagers with customary rights to graze their stock on the village commons were constantly involved in vexing questions of agricultural law. Nearly all that class of men who were sufficiently advantaged to be literate would have hoped to end their days as landed proprietors on at least a small scale or, if they belonged to the clergy, as the holders of benefices that were ordinarily supported by agricultural tithes. We may suspect that Herrick was not wholly disinterested when he wrote his epigram "Upon Much-more":

    Much-more, provides, and hoords up like an Ant;
    Yet Much-more still complains he is in want.
    Let Much-more justly pay his tythes; then try
    How both his Meale and Oile will multiply.

Similarly, the fellows of an Oxford or Cambridge college often dealt with such matters as the quarterly rents from college properties and with how the college holdings might best be improved or, it might be, enclosed. Sir Richard Weston, author of A Discours of Husbandrie used in Brabant and Flanders (1650), speaks with uncommon bluntness:

If you observ the common Cours of things, you will finde that Husbandrie is the end, which men of all Estates in the world do point at: For to what purpose do Souldiers, Scholars, Lawyers, Merchants, and men of all occupations and trades, toil and labor with great affection, but to get monie; and with that monie when they have gotten it, but to purchase Land; and to what end do they buy that Land, but to receiv the fruits of it to live; and how shall one receiv the fruits of it, but by his own Husbandrie, or by a Farmers? So that it appear's by degrees, that what cours soëver a man taketh in this world, at last hee cometh to Husbandrie, which is the most common occupation amongst men.

Such were the facts; yet it is surprising how infrequently those facts are reflected in the literature of the period. Poets generally prefer the fiction that the country gentleman and his ancestors have always owned his estates, and that the chief function of those estates is to afford rural ease to the host and hospitality to guests.

Between the Augustan Age of Rome and that of England, literary historians have noticed a few scattered imitations of the Georgics, not very like the original, and in England they have noted that Renaissance schoolmasters sometimes set the Georgics as a text. Of course, if at any time during this supposed hiatus a writer had occasion to speak of style, he would automatically cite the formula that assigned low style to pastoral, middle to georgic, and high to epic. Still, the trope might be thought to have become little more than a reflex. Poets with Virgilian pretensions often leapt straight out of pastoral into epic, without troubling to serve out an apprenticeship at the georgic level. Therefore in English poetry the georgic is usually said to begin with Dryden's translation of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, which was published in 1697 along with Dryden's laudatory preface and Addison's influential essay on the georgic kind. For the first time in the seventeenth century, save for a remarkable compliment by the iconoclastic Montaigne, Dryden argued that the Georgics was Virgil's finest poem, and that he wrote it, "in the full strength and vigour of his Age, when his Judgment was at the height, and before his Fancy was declining." Addison agreed, calling the poem "the most Compleat, Elaborate, and finisht Piece of all Antiquity."

Three earlier English translations of the Georgics were published, the first by "A.F.," probably Abraham Fleming, in 1589.13 Still it was Dryden's genius that enabled him, as so often, to discover and proclaim a new fashion. Not even the appearance of his much-admired Aeneid the following year could prevent his Georgics from touching off a new mode that was to last through much of the eighteenth century, reaching its acknowledged peak in Thomson's Seasons before it petered out among a new "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease."

Aside from frequent but usually perfunctory appeals to the middle style, the Georgics survived most obviously in seventeenth-century poetry in a few important but fragmented motifs and topoi. The popular myth of Orpheus, symbol of the artist, of the harmonizer and civilizer, although it owes much to the Metamorphoses, achieved its most notable statement in Georgics 4. The myth of Proteus, so important to the age as a symbol for changeable matter in the phenomenal world, while it originates in the Odyssey, likewise takes vivid form in Georgics 4. A still more prominent topos, the idea or image of the Golden Age, though it owes much to Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil's "Messianic" Eclogue, persistently echoes and alludes to the Georgics. Yet these golden-age allusions seldom adhere to the georgic spirit of the Virgilian original. Thus Montaigne's seminal essay "Of Cannibals," which was to bear fruit in Rousseau's potent doctrine of primitive man, turns to the Georgics for its single supporting citation; but Montaigne draws his Virgilian distinctions between labor and ease, property and community, invention and indolence, hierarchy and brotherhood, injustice and justice, in order to move away from a georgic world of work, invention, and civilization into precisely the pastoral idyll that Virgil had invoked to provide a contrast with the hard and laborious world of his farmers.

In the Georgics, Virgil suggests that the Golden Age of ease and communistic justice is gone forever. Instead, he proposes an alternative, exemplified by the "happy husbandman." This figure Virgil associates with a more recent past, when Roman ancestors lived a simpler and nobler life as farmers, before the city was cursed with luxury and civil war. The whole course of the Georgics suggests that this ideal, unlike the Golden Age, may actually be reattainable. Under the enlightened leadership of Octavius and by means of the exertions of individual citizens, typified by but not necessarily limited to the husbandman, Rome may once more be entering a period of happiness and prosperity, which is characterized not by a miraculous transformation back to primal otium, as Virgil had earlier prophesied in Eclogue 4, but by the performance of equitable labor for the common welfare. In such circumstances, work is transformed from a curse into a blessing.

Ironically, though Virgil's happy husbandman proved highly popular throughout the seventeenth century, in title-page epigraphs, translations, and verse paraphrases, social conditions and assumptions were such that this figure was persistently transformed from a georgic exemplar into what amounted to simply another variation on the theme of pastoral ease. The georgic mode was not congenial. When Christopher Johnson took his schoolboys at Winchester through the Georgics in 1563, he felt obliged to warn them not to despise agricultural labor, which the Romans obviously valued much more highly than did the English. But warnings of this kind had little effect on those schoolboys who grew up to be poets and writers. In a hierarchical society it was proper for a schoolboy to work hard, or an agricultural laborer, but not a full-grown man of the educated classes. "[G]oe chide / Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices," Donne's lover tells an intrusive, taskmaster sun; "Call countrey ants to harvest offices." An English gentleman might readily imagine himself sitting on a hillside at his ease, dressed in shepherd's garb, playing on his pipes or making love to the local shepherdesses, but ordinarily he was unlikely to imagine himself a plowman.

The Pastoral Viewpoint

The prejudices with which the age began, which were as much political and social as they were literary, are typically represented by Richard Barnfield. "The Shepherds Content, or The hapines of a harmless life" (1594) begins: "Of ail the kindes of common Countrey life, / Me thinkes a Shepheards life is most Content" (1-2). Not surprisingly, Barnfield's shepherd has few labors or duties to perform, but is put into the world chiefly to enjoy himself. The only threats to his happiness are ambition, which might take him to court, and all-conquering love, which not even a shepherd can escape (216-73). His only chore is to see that those sheep that contravene the rules of hierarchy are "pounded" (155-61). A more idyllic life could scarcely be imagined:

    He sits all Day lowd-piping on a Hill,
    The whilst his flocke about him daunce apace,
    His hart with joy, his eares with Musique fill:
    Anon a bleating Weather beares the Bace,
    A Lambe the Treble; and to his disgrace
      Another answers like a middle Meane:
      Thus every one to beare a Part are faine.
    (141-47)

Quite opposite to this pleasant otium is the lot of the husbandman, who is somewhat illogically lumped together with courtiers, scholars, merchants, and soldiers as an instance of how "low degree" as well as too much ambition can lead to trouble and unrest:

    The painfull Plough-swaine, and the Husband-man
    Rise up each morning by the breake of day,
    Taking what toyle and drudging paines they can,
    And all is for to get a little stay;
    And yet they cannot put their care away:
      When Night is come, their cares begin afresh,
      Thinking upon their Morrowes busines.
    (99-105)

This realistic husbandman, unlike those pretended figures in translations of Virgil and Horace who are really courtly shepherds in disguise, is not a "happy husbandman." How could he be, in the common Elizabethan view, when he is base-born, rude, poor, and condemned to endless labor?

What many poets really thought about rustics is documented by James Turner. Alexander Brome (1661) pretends to retire from polite society to country contentment, but he thinks very little of his real country neighbors:

    Here, if we mix with company, 'tis such
    As can say nothing though they talk too much.
    Here we learn georgicks, here the Buckolicks,
    Which buildings cheapest, timber, stone, or bricks.
    Here Adams natural Sons, all made of Earth —
    Earth's their Religion, their discourse, their mirth.

The unknown author of Honoria and Mammon (1659) provides us with an even more unsparing portrait, which indicates with full vividness how an aristocratic "shepherd" might view a real countryman who happened to cross his path:

    thou horrid Lumpe
    Of leather, coarse wooll, ignorance, and husbandry,
    Most pitifully compounded, thou that
    Hast liv'd so long a dunghill, till the weeds
    Had over-grown thee, and but ten yards off
    Cosen'd a horse that came to graze upon thee.

For the most part, however, poets preferred not to spoil their landscapes with such ugly objects; better to ignore the rural laborer entirely, keep him in the background, or transform him from a georgic into an acceptably pastoral figure.

One may notice the characteristic psychological impediment in coming to terms with the profession of husbandry even in a manual on choosing a trade. Thomas Powell, who directs his Tom of All Trades (1631) to the hopeful parents of young men looking for work appropriate to their means and abilities, of necessity touches on the commonest profession of all; but he cannot refrain from the customary note of comic scorn:

Your sonne whom you intend for a Husbandman, must be a disposition part gentile, and rustike equally mixt together, for if the Gentleman be predominant: his running Nagge will out run the Constable. His extraordinary strong Beere will be too headstrong in office of Church-Warden. And his well mouthed dogges will make him out-mouth all the Vestrie. But if the clowne be predominant he will smell all browne bread and garlicke. (sigs. F2v-F3r)

In other words, the gentleman is too well-bred and high-spirited to farm, but the rustic is beneath contempt. That interesting hybrid, the gentleman-farmer, who in later years will be the commonest of sights and of literary ideals, is only barely conceivable to Powell and his readers — as an impossible paradox or a bad joke.

Not too surprisingly, therefore, English poets who praise the happy husbandman prefer the milder and less laborious version of his life that is offered in Horace's second epode, Beatus ille. Notoriously, it turns out in the end that the body of this poem has been spoken by the usurer Alphius, who has just finished collecting his rents and is toying with the idea of retiring to a country villa. But, in the closing stanza, "avarice again gains the upper hand," and he decides to remain in Rome. In other words, seductive as Horace's poem is, it represents the vision of a city-dweller dreaming of the country life, and it reflects few of the nagging realities. It is also notorious that most of the English translators and paraphrasers of these popular lines dropped Horace's ironic stance along with his final stanza and thus essentially revealed themselves as gentlemen amateurs. Ben Jonson is a notable exception. William Browne, whose pastorals Milton extensively annotated and who deserves credit for being more realistic than most, nevertheless can insert a leisured stanza such as this into his paraphrase of Horace:

    By some sweet stream, clear as his thought,
    He seats him with his book and line;
    And though his hand have nothing caught,
    His mind hath whereupon to dine.

Obviously these are not the reveries of a laborer or a subsistence farmer. Browne's "Happy Life" is not wholly without labor, but it is a labor that is well under control:

    His afternoon spent as the prime
    Inviting where he mirthful sups;
    Labour, or seasonable time,
    Brings him to bed and not his cups.

Perhaps Browne's vision is Stoic as well as Epicurean; yet there is nothing in it of Virgil's constant and even terrifying toil, which is better captured, although rejected, in Barnfield's brief portrait. To be truly georgic, a poem should come face to face with the realistic details of farming life, see them for what they are, yet accept them and even glorify them. Apparently most writers in England found such concepts impossible to think about, and even in the eighteenth century poets seem to find it difficult not to sink back into the repose of the gentleman amateur, all of whose work is performed for him by his laborers — including the work of supervision.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Illustrations, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. 1
• 1. Resistance to Georgic, pg. 13
• 2. Poet of Work: Spenser and the Courtly Ideal, pg. 35
• 3. The New Century, pg. 71
• 4. New Science and the Georgic Revolution, pg. 117
• 5. Georgic and Christian Reform, pg. 155
• 6. Georgic and the Civil War, pg. 221
• 7. Milton and the Georgic Ideal, pg. 296
• Conclusion, pg. 353
• Index, pg. 359