There’s an odd passage in Howards End where Forster images a woodcutter up a tree, sawing a bough and watching mourners gather for the funeral of the woman who owned the country house that gives the novel its name:
At last the bough fell beneath his saw. With a grunt, he descended, his thoughts dwelling no longer on death, but on love, for he was mating. He stopped as he passed the new grave; a sheaf of tawny chrysanthemums had caught his eye. “They didn’t ought to have coloured flowers at buryings,” he reflected. Trudging on a few steps, he stopped again, looked furtively at the dusk, turned back, wrenched a chrysanthemum from the sheaf, and hid it in his pocket.
That animal “mating” doesn’t seem worthy of the humanist credo defined (in “serious yet buoyant tones”) by one of the novel’s heroines: “To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged…”
I bet it stuck out to Raymond Williams who grew up among country people. (It is, perhaps, less than shocking that Williams tended to leave Forster’s work out of the Great Tradition of the English Novel.) I’m reminded of Williams’ hard lines on George Eliot’s failure to give herself fully to her country characters. Eliot was like family to Williams and his critique of her in The Country and the City amounts to something rare—a clarifying family argument. The sharp tone in the following swatch from Williams’ classic text isn’t so familial. Williams keeps cool but he looks back in anger on one strain of country writing…
Ben Jonson’s Penshurst and To Sir Robert Wroth, and Thomas Carew’s To Saxham…use a particular version of country life as a way of expressing, in the form of a complement to a house or its owner, certain social and moral values…
It of course is clear that in each of the poems, though more strongly and convincingly in Jonson, the social order is seen as a part of a wider order, what is now sometimes called a natural order, with metaphysical sanctions. Certainly nothing is more remarkable than the stress on the providence of Nature, but this, we must see on reflection, is double-edged. What kind of wit is it exactly—for it must be wit; the most ardent traditionalists will hardly claim it for observation—which has the birds and other creatures offering themselves to be eaten? The estate of Penshurst, as Jonson sees it:
To crowne thy open table, doth provide
The purpled pheasant with the speckled side:
The painted partrich lyes in every field
And, for thy messe, is willing to be kill’d
Carew extends this same hyperbole:
The Pheasant, Partridge, and the Lark
Flew to my house, as to the Ark.
The willing Oxe, of himselfe came
Home to the slaughter, with the Lamb,
And every beast did thither bring
Himselfe to be an offering.
The scalie herd, more pleasure took
Bath’d in the dish than in the brook.
In fact the wit depends, in such passages, on a shared and conscious point of view toward nature.
The awareness of hyperbole is there, is indeed what is conventional in just this literary convention, and is controlled and ratified, in any wider view, by a common consciousness. At one level there is a willing and happy ethic of consuming, made evident by the organization of the poems around the centrality of the dining table. Yet the possible grossness of this, as in Carew (a willing largeness of hyperbole, as in so many Cavalier poems, as the awareness of the alternative point of view makes a simple statement impossible) is modified in Jonson by a certain pathos, a conscious realization of his situation:
And I not faine to sit (as some, this day,
At great men’s tables) and yet dine away.
Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by,
A waiter, doth my gluttony envy:
But gives me what I call, and lets me eate.
It is difficult not to feel the relief of that. Indeed there is more than a hint, in the whole tone of this hospitable eating and drinking, of that easy, insatiable exploitation of the land and its creatures—a prolonged delight in an organized and corporative production and consumption—which is the basis of many early phases of intensive agriculture: the land is rich, and will be made to provide. But it is then more difficult to talk, in a simple way, of a “natural order,” as if this was man in concert with nature. On the contrary: this natural order is simply and decisively on its way to the table.
Of course, in both Jonson and Carew, though again more convincingly in Jonson, this view of the providence of nature is linked to a human sharing: all are welcome, even the poor, to be fed at this board. And it is this stress, more than any other, which has supported the view of a responsible civilization, in which men care for each other directly and personally, rather than through the abstractions of a more complicated and more commercial society. This, we are told, is the natural order, of responsibility and neighborliness and charity: words we do not now clearly understand, since Old England fell.
Of course one sees what is meant, and as a first approximation, a simple impulse, it is kindly. But the Christian tradition of charity is at just this point weak. For it is a charity of consumption only, as Rosa Luxemburg first pointed out:
The Roman proletariat did not live by working, but from the alms which the government doled out. So the demands of the Christians for collective property did not relate to the means of production, but the means of consumption.
And then, as Adrian Cunningham has argued, this version of charity—of loving relations between men expressed as a community of consumption, with the Christian board and the breaking of bread as its natural images, and the feast as its social consummation—was prolonged into periods and societies in which it became peripheral or even damaging. A charity of production—of loving relations between men actually working and producing what is ultimately, in whatever proportions, to be shared—was neglected, not seen, and at times suppressed, by this habitual reference to a charity of consumption, an eating and drinking communion, which when applied to ordinary working societies was inevitably a mystification. All uncharity at work, it was readily assumed, could be redeemed by the charity of the consequent feast. In the complex of feeling and reference derived from this tradition, it matters very much, moreover, that the name of the god and the name of the master are significantly single—the Lord.
Any mystification, however requires effort. The world of Penshurst or of Saxham can be seen as a moral economy only by conscious selection and emphasis. And this is just what we get: not only in the critical reading I have referred to, but in Jonson’s and Carew’s actual poems. There were of course social reasons for that way of seeing: the identification of the writers, as guests, with the social position of their hosts, consuming what other men had produced. But a traditional image, already becoming complicated, was an indispensable poetic support. It is not only the Golden Age, as in Jonson to Sir Robert Wroth, though Penshurst, in its first positive description, is seen through classical literature: the woods of Kent contain Dryads and Pan and Bacchus, and the providing deities of the charity are Penates. More deeply, however, in a conventional association of Christian and classical myth, the provident land is seen as Eden. The country in which all things come naturally to man, for his uses and enjoyment and without his effort, is that Paradise:
The early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig, grape and quince, each in his time doth come:
The blushing apricot, and wooly peach
Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach
Except it is not seen as Paradise; it is seen as Penshurst, a natural order arranged by a proprietary lord and lady. The manipulation is evident when we remember Marvell’s somewhat similar lines in The Garden:
The Nectaren, and curious Peach
Into my hands themselves do reach
Stumbling on Melons, as I pass,
Insnar’d with flowers, I fall on grass
Here the enjoyment of what seems a natural bounty, a feeling of paradise in the garden, is exposed to another kind of wit: the easy consumption goes before the fall. And we can then remember that the whole result of the fall from paradise was that instead of picking easily from an all-providing nature, man had to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow; that he incurred, by a common fate, the curse of labor. What is really happening, in Jonson’s and Carew’s celebration of a rural order, is the extraction of just this curse, by the power of art; a magical recreation of what can be seen as a natural bounty and then a willing charity: both serving to ratify and bless the country landowner, or, by a characteristic reification, his house. Yet this magical extraction of the curse of labor is in fact achieved by simple extraction of the existence of laborers. The actual men and women who rear the animals and drive them to the house and kill them and prepare them for meat; who trap the pheasants and partridges and catch the fish; who plant and measure and prune and harvest the fruit trees: these are not present; their work is all done for them by the natural order. When they do at last appear, it is merely as “the rout of rural folke” or, more simply, as “much poore,” and what we are shown is the charity and lack of condescension with which they are given what, now and somehow, not they but the natural order has given for food, into the lord’s hands. It is this condition, this set of relationships, that is finally ratified by the consummation of the feast. It is worth setting briefly alongside this a later description of a country feast, by one of the laborers: Stephen Duck, in the late 1720s:
A Table plentifully spread we find,
And jugs of huming ale to cheer the Mind,
Which he, too gen’rous, pushes round so fast
We think no Toils to come, nor mind the past
But the next morning soon reveals the Cheat
When the same Toils we must repeat;
To the same Barns must back again return
To labor there for Room for next Year’s Corn
It is this connection, between the feast and work, that the earlier images significantly obscure, taking the passing moment in which anyone might forget labor and acquiesce in “the Cheat,” and making it “natural” and permanent. It is this way of seeing that really counts. Jonson looks out over the fields of Penshurst and sees, not work, but a land yielding of itself. Carew, characteristically, does not even look:
Through frost, and snow, lock’d from mine eyes
That beauty which without door lyes…
…Yet (Saxham) thou within thy gate
Art of thy self so delicate,
So full of native sweets, that bless
The roof with inward happiness;
As neither from, not to thy store,
Winter takes ought, or Spring adds more
So that here not only work, but even the turning of produce of the seasons, is suppressed or obscured in the complimentary mystification: an innate bounty: “native sweets.” To call this a natural order is then an abuse of language. It is what the poems are: not country life but social compliment; the familiar hyperbole of the aristocracy and its attendants.
The social order within which Jonson’s and Carew’s poems took conventional shape was in fact directly described in another kind of country poem, of which Herrick’s The Hock-Cart (1646) is a good example. Here the fact of labor is acknowledged:
Come Sons of Summer, by whose toils
We are the lords of wine and Oile:
By whose tough labors, and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crown’d with the cares of corne, now come,
And to the Pipe, sing Harvest home.
But this is that special kind of work-song, addressed to the work of others. When the harvest has been brought home, the poem continues
Come forth my Lord, and see the Cart
This lord is (in the poem’s address) the “Right Honourable Lord Mildmay, Earl of Westmorland,” and Herrick places himself between the lord and the laborers to make explicit (what in Jonson and Carew had been implicit and mystified) the governing social relations. The labourers must drink to the Lord’s health, and then remember all to go back to work, like the animals:
…Ye must revoke
The patient Oxe into the Yoke
And all goe back into the plough
And harrow (though they’re hanged up now)
And, you must know, your Lord’s word’s true,
Feed him ye must, whose food fills you
And that this pleasure is like raine
Not sent ye for to drowne your paine
But for to make it spring againe.
It is crude in feeling, this early and jollying kind of man-management, which uses the metaphors of rain and spring to see even the drink as a way of getting more labor (and more pain). But what is there on the surface–
Feed him ye must, whose food fills you
is the aching paradox which is subsumed in the earlier images of natural bounty. It is perhaps not surprising that The Hock-Cart is less often quoted as an example of a natural and moral economy than Penshurst or To Saxham. Yet all that is in question is the degree of consciousness or real processes. What Herrick embarrassingly intones is what Jonson and Carew mediate. It is a social order, and a consequent way of seeing, which we are not now likely to forget.
Williams comes back to Herrick (the horror) once more, comparing country writing marked by “ineradicable melancholy” (such as Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) with the “sense of the settlement, even satisfaction and self-satisfaction” in Herrick’s A Thanksgiving:
Lord, Thou has given me a cell
Wherein to dwell,
A little house, whose humble Roof
Is weather-proof
…Low is my porch, as is my Fate,
Both void of state;
And yet the threshold of my doore
Is worn by th’ poore.
As it happens, I first read this poem, as a child, under a roof and a porch probably lower than Herrick’s, and I could then neither get the lines out of my mind nor feel other than angry about them. My father had brought it home, in a book called, Hours with English Authors, which was a set-book at an evening class he was attending in the village. He had been asked (it is how values are taught) to learn it by heart; he asked me to see if he could. I remember looking and wondering who the poor were, and why they wore this threshold, if the poet’s condition was indeed so low. I understand that better now. The poverty is seen in an upward glance, by the goldsmith’s nephew, the former court poet, the Royalist parson, deprived of his living in the commonwealth. The poverty of the majority of men is a different dimension, below the level of comparison. But this was not the source of the anger, which came from a sense of the play at abasement, putting himself even lower than the porch and being so pleased about it. As I repeat the lines now, I seem still to hear the whine–“A little house, whose humble roof…”–(he was lucky, after all that, that it was weatherproof); the whine of a kind of feeling which we used to hear, in a few families, generally despised in the village: a self-conscious lowering when there was charity or religion around. It passed straight in my mind, this poem, to
God bless the squire and his relations
And keep us in our stations
And when I read Herrick’s Hock-Cart, with its open management of feeling for the Earl of Westmorland, I felt I had been right, even in my untutored reading (I was of course told later in Cambridge, that the poem was an example of Christian virtue and settlement, which we couldn’t easily appreciate in these degenerate progressive times).