SOURCE: “Adam Bede as a Pastoral,” in Genre, Vol. IX, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 59-72.

[In the following essay, Marotta outlines the characteristics of a pastoral, and discusses the limitations of analyzing the pastoral elements in Adam Bede.]

Many critics have attempted to account for the pastoral element in Adam Bede, with varying success. These discussions of the novel as a pastoral are of two kinds, which correspond to two ways of defining the genre. The first, which I will call the “simple” definition, offers a list of pastoral items (the theme of retreat and return, the depiction of a locus amoenus, etc.). The author of the pastoral either presents the items in order to identify the genre to which they contribute, or employs the genre in order to present the items; in both cases, the genre is its own justification, and the motive for its use can be pursued no farther than the author's nostalgic delight in the pastoral world. What I will call the “allegorical” definition, on the other hand, begins with a meaning, a purpose which the pastoral subserves. Here, pastoral is one particular kind of allegory, a kind that, in Empson's broad definition, puts the complex into the simple. These different definitions can be seen to arise from the problematic nature of the genre: they can be easily translated as the Nature and Art of Renaissance pastoral debate, such as that conducted in Marvell's poetry.¹ But in the opposition of things meaningful in themselves to things meaningful by their attributed significances, these different views of pastoral correspond to oppositions that nearly always arise in discussions of Eliot's works: “art” and “ideology,” “realism” and “moralism.” And the views of Adam Bede that arise out of these contrary definitions also correspond to the traditional contraries of Eliot criticism. This suggests that a discussion of the pastoral element in the novel can only be dubiously illuminating. In fact, however, such discussion can illuminate both Eliot's purposes and a characteristically Victorian use of pastoral.

We may begin by noting the common limitation of the two attempts to describe the pastoral element in Adam Bede: their opposition of the novel's use of pastoral to its claims, stated in Chapter xvii, to the “faithful representing of commonplace things.” The “simple” view of pastoral has been put forth most recently and comprehensively by Michael Squires in The Pastoral Novel. By his definition, the pastoral novel, of which he discusses specimens by Hardy and Lawrence as well as Eliot, is characterized by some number of the following “elements and techniques of traditional pastoral”:

the contrast between city and country; the recreation of rural life from both urban and rural viewpoints; the implied withdrawal from complexity to simplicity; the nostalgia for a Golden-Age past of peace and satisfaction; the implied criticism of modern life; and the creation of a circumscribed and remote pastoral world.²

Critics who apply this kind of definition to Adam Bede must either ignore certain of the harsher aspects of its world or see a split between these “realistic” aspects and the pastoral aspects.³ The “allegorical” critics, on the other hand, do not see this opposition, nor do they exclude suffering from their pastoral world. But realism is equally alien to their version of pastoral, which pretends to record no true landscape—which need not even take place in the country.⁴ Although one kind of critic sees Eliot's pastoralism as decoration and the other sees it as allegory, both find it inconsistent with Eliot's pretensions to realism, and both see it as a form of self-deception (although what the former critics would call evasion the latter would ultimately call the creation of a religion). Neither of the resultant images of Eliot—as sentimental celebrant or as sibyl—seems just to Eliot or to the kind of realism she sought.

For Eliot herself pointed out this apparent divergence between pastoral and a truthful record of country life, most explicitly in her essay “The Natural History of German Life.” A life in the fields, she asserts, is no guarantee of happiness, straight teeth, and high morality.⁵ The complaint is repeated in Adam Bede: “The bucolic character of Hayslope, you perceive, was not of that entirely genial, merry, broad-grinning sort, apparently observed in most districts visited by artists.”⁶ Thus, at least in her explicit statements, Eliot objects to the notion of peasants as putti.

Yet in that same essay, Eliot's argument for the interest of the true peasantry attributes to that body qualities pertaining to these artificial pastoral conventions. There was less invidious social distinction among the English peasantry of “half a century ago”: “the master helped to milk his own cows, and the daughters got up at one o’clock in the morning to brew … the family dined in the kitchen with the servants, and sat with them round the kitchen fire in the evening.” There was a lack of individuality, a sameness of interests and characteristics which militated against change and preserved peace; even feuds, preserved through history, became ritualized “under the milder form of an occasional round of cudgelling and the launching of traditional nicknames.” The material and aesthetic luxuries of civilization are lacking: “In those days, the quarried parlour was innocent of a carpet, and its only specimens of art were a framed sampler and the best teaboard … instead of carrying on sentimental correspondence, [the daughters] were spinning their future table-linen.”⁷

Eliot seems consciously to bring this ambivalence to our attention in Adam Bede. The inhabitants of Hayslope can appear to be artless, adherent to custom, in harmony with Nature. The dancing at Arthur's birthday feast is merry, simple, sprightly, in contrast to the “languid men in lacquered boots smiling with double meaning” of our own day, when dancing has lost both its simplicity and its customary function of reaffirming social bonds and social hierarchy: “It’ll serve you to talk on, Hetty, when you’re an old woman—how you danced wi’ th’ young Squire the day he came o’ age” (xxvi). But this instance of simplicity and custom is charged with a contrary meaning: Hetty has more than danced with the young Squire, whose smiles do carry a double meaning; and just for this reason she will never be an old woman. Nor can the natural comforts of Hayslope hide the different world of Snowfield, an industrial world that will alter Hayslope's future. Even within this pleasant natural world, no benign influence is exerted over Hetty Sorrel. Perhaps the best sign of the deceptiveness of this pastoral appearance is the fact that such conceptions are attributed to characters themselves deceived or deceiving. When Arthur kisses Hetty, “he may be a shepherd in Arcadia for aught he knows” (xiii); and Adam thinks his marriage with Hetty will be “a marriage such as they made in the golden age” (xv).

As these ambiguities suggest, the perception of pastoral attributes depends upon the condition of the viewer. Mrs. Poyser's comments on farm life are perhaps the most characteristic expression of this fact: “Yes; a farmhouse is a fine thing for them as look on, an’ don’t know the liftin’, an’ the stannin’, an’ the worritin’ o’ th’ inside, as belongs to’t” (xx). Only at a distance does life take on these ideal simplicities and congruities: “The jocose talk of haymakers is best at a distance; like those clumsy bells round the cows necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature” (xix). And, as Squires has shown in convincing detail, the narrator himself at times keeps this distance, designedly sustaining the pastoral illusion.⁸

This ambivalence towards the pastoral is very like Wordsworth's. In Book VIII of The Prelude, Wordsworth rejects “literary” pastoral—the classical Arcadia, Shakespeare's pastorals, Spenser's—for “the rural ways / And manners which may childhood looked upon / … the unluxuriant produce of a life / Intent on little but substantial needs, / Yet rich in beauty, beauty that was felt.”⁹ But his description of rustic life in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads as simple, artless, unchanging, and more real than other lives, is like Eliot's in its return to the convention.¹⁰

Point of view is significant to Wordsworth's pastoral as well: the meaning of his rustics depends on his distance from them. Their eminent reality is an artifice, a willed appearance dependent upon the viewer as much as the mellowness of landscapes was upon the Claude-Lorraines through which eighteenth-century enthusiasts looked. The artificiality is evident in the special style which, Harold Toliver argues, Wordsworth uses to convey the special truth of the rustic life: either an “abstract language” which “allows some sense of place and time to coexist with types of eternity” or a concrete language that points beyond itself to what is lost or hidden.¹¹

These two styles are interestingly similar to the two George Eliot's critics see: one relying on the multifarious capacities of language, the other doomed to the flatness of a gilt-framed mirror. What is yet more interesting is that these two styles are employed in Adam Bede not simply by Eliot trying to infer ideals in the grimmer aspects of life in Hayslope, but by the characters themselves. In the depiction of her characters' efforts, Eliot is regarding critically the transforming act of pastoralizing.

The reality the characters must transform is what appears to them in moments of disillusionment. Barbara Hardy has pointed out the recurrence of such moments in Eliot's works.¹² One locus in Adam Bede is Hetty's awakening the morning after reading Arthur's letter:

Every morning to come, as far as her imagination could stretch, she would have to get up and feel that the day would have no joy for her … she should always be doing things she had no pleasure in, getting up to the old tasks of work, seeing people she cared nothing about, going to church, and to Treddleston, and to tea with Mrs. Best, and carrying no happy thought with her. (xxxi)

Such quotidian realities can be transfigured by love or religious feeling. The influence of Arthur's affection made Hetty “tread the ground and go about her work in a sort of dream, unconscious of weight or effort, and [showed] her all things through a soft, liquid veil, as if she were living not in this solid world of brick and stone, but in a beatified world” (ix). In the same way Adam sees in Hetty that beauty “beyond and far above the one woman's soul that it clothes … he called his love frankly a mystery. … He only knew that the sight and memory of her moved him deeply, touching the spring of all love and tenderness, all faith and courage within him” (xxxiii).

Alternatively, reality can be transformed by Mrs. Poyser's combination of memory and prophecy, which can find a tale in everything:

“Spinning, indeed! It isn’t spinning as you’d be at, I’ll be bound, and let you have your own way. … To think of a gell o’ your age wanting to go and sit with half-a-dozen men! … And you, as have been here ever since last Michaelmas, and I hired you at Treddles’on stattits, without a bit of character—as I say, you might be grateful to be hired in that way to a respectable place. … Why, you’d leave the dirt in heaps i’ the corners—anybody ’ud think you’d never been brought up among Christians. … You’re never easy till you’ve got some sweetheart as is as big a fool as yourself: you think you’ll be finely off when you’re married, I daresay, and have got a three-legged stool to sit on, and never a blanket to cover you, and a bit o’ oat-cake for your dinner, as three children are a-snatching at.” (vi)

Even when she is quoted at such length, as she must be, Mrs. Poyser's effect is difficult to convey. Her speeches do not have limitations, beginnings and endings, like those of other speakers; this is in fact part of the point of this character, as I will suggest below.

I would assert that these two modes of transformation correspond to Wordsworth's two modes of using language. The first mode is an invocation of abstract terms, usually coupled with a lament that all words are futile. The schism between the concrete occasion and the abstract language is obvious, being applied to characters who could not use such language themselves. The passage on Adam's response to Hetty's beauty quoted above includes the remark “our good Adam had no fine words into which he could put his feeling for Hetty,” before proceeding, “he could not disguise mystery in this way with the appearance of knowledge.” Precisely in Adam's inarticulateness is his closeness to the truth of feeling. The abstractions he could not use thus emphasize the ineffability of the experience, and so paradoxically seem all the better to suggest it.

The second mode is an associative accumulation of concrete facts of past or future which often militates against meaning itself: Mrs. Poyser has so much difficulty keeping to a subject that her original meaning is almost always lost. The only message that succeeds in emerging from her harangues is the need to stave off the ever-encroaching chaos by constant vigilance—an ironic message, surely, when one considers its chaotic vehicle.

The ultimate tendency of the first sort of transformation is visible in a character such as Dinah, whose habit it is “to forget where I am and everything about me, and lose myself in thoughts that I could give no account of, for I could neither make beginning nor ending of them in words” (viii). The tendency of the second sort of transformation is visible in Mrs. Poyser. While Dinah's abstraction tends to a mystical—or self-deceived—silence, Mrs. Poyser's unceasing lectures tend to the opposite, a tendency finally fulfilled in one of the novel's scenes most clearly in the tradition of the simple pastoral: the harvest supper. In this scene, Eliot repeatedly emphasizes the primitive and ceremonial character of the events by ironic comparisons of the participants to Tityrus and Meliboeus and of their song to the Homeric writings. At the end of the scene we reach the long-awaited confrontation between Bartle Massey and Mrs. Poyser, a confrontation whose staged character seems confessed by Mr. Poyser's attitude throughout. This battle of the sexes is brought to a conclusion (as Mrs. Poyser says, “I say as some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside”) by the sudden uproar of those Homeric ballads being sung all at once at full volume. The various elements of the uproar (at which Dinah is not present, having fled from Adam's avowal of love)—the ceremony, the pastoral echoes, the ritual debate, and Mrs. Poyser's final remark—contribute to a single statement: the language by which we seek to transfigure unordered reality can itself be a further chaos, can be mere noise. The novel's plot conveys the limitations of these different modes of transformation by the failure of both Mrs. Poyser and Dinah to provide proper nurture or comfort for Hetty, and by the insufficiency of Hetty's own version of these attitudes (her dreams of Arthur and the opposing vision of her daily activities).

An equally significant method of criticizing these pastoralizing attitudes is Eliot's own use of them, the limits becoming apparent in the conflict of the two attitudes. We see instances of the simple, descriptive method, apparently rooted in nostalgia, in Eliot's presentation of characters such as the Miss Irwines, “inartistic figures crowding the canvas of life without adequate effect” (v), introduced in the novel apparently for the purpose of asserting the relevance of the irrelevant. The Miss Irwines forestall theoretical objections against Irwine's type of ministry in two ways: by providing an opportunity for Irwine to reveal his charitable principles, they offer evidence against aspersions on his moral character; in addition—and this is what is most important here—by the simple fact of their concreteness and particularity, they offer evidence against all merely theoretical arguments. They are a sort of noise, and this is precisely their value. Mrs. Poyser is herself “noise” like this, the superfluity of the chapter in which she has her “say out” being particularly noticeable (and noticed by critics).

To these instances might be added all that seem irrelevant to the plot of seduction and betrayal: the set-pieces of praise for lost days, the descriptions of Nature, the traditional ceremonies, those intrusions of a first-person narrator conceived not as omnipotent artist but as a man who might have lived in a world like Adam's, whose “we” joins us with him and with the novel's characters. In these instances, too, Eliot is before us in pointing out the irrelevance: denying her shame for “commemorating old Kester” (liii), discussing our participation in Adam's imperfect world in a chapter “in which the story pauses a little,” most obviously, perhaps, insisting upon the indifference to her story of the nature she records. Although its cycles are comfortingly invoked and its imagery is confidently used to explain the development of the characters, Nature is ultimately mysterious. Its indifference, the narrator insists, evades any meaning attached to it: “For if it be true that Nature at certain moments seems charged with a presentiment of one individual lot, must it not also be true that she seems unmindful, unconscious of another?” (xxvii). The strongest expression of the natural world's resistance of meaning is Eliot's use of the “et in Arcadia ego” theme whose history has been traced by Erwin Panofsky.¹³ “It was a strangely mingled picture—the fresh youth of the summer morning, with its Eden-like peace and loveliness, the stalwart strength of the two brothers in their rusty morning clothes, and the long coffin on their shoulders” (iv). Later the narrator muses again on the landscape of Loamshire:

What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills! I have often thought so when, in foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire—the rich land tilled with so much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows—I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire: an image of great agony—the agony of the Cross … and surely, if there came a traveller to this world who knew nothing of the story of man's life upon it, this image of agony would seem to him strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous nature. (xxxv)

In both instances, Eliot points out the strange inconcinnity between man and his world: Nature has nothing to say to these greatest crises of men's lives. In the second instance, even the symbol on which the rhetoric turns must be imported from the Continent.

The opposite sort of transformation is suggested by the narrator's alternate stance, as one at a distance from what he records—the distance of creator from creation. Those passages that transform reality in an abstract language unavailable to the characters reveal by their imagery the basis of the transformation in the artist's power: “Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty” (iii). Such references seem peculiarly incongruous in the context of Hayslope; note, for instance, the different effects of the art-references in Eliot's other novels, where the art-works are part of the characters' environments—Cheverel Manor, fifteenth-century Florence, Rome, London studios. Art is what the narrator knows about and the characters don’t. Furthermore, it is what the narrator uses: by his references to art he gives meaning to his created pastoral world, he embodies in it even those kinds of experience it would seem necessarily to exclude. As in Marvell's pastoral, “though art … accepts itself as a tour de force, becoming deliberately diminished and artificial in its aims, it will not give up a magical ambition to rival or supplant nature.”¹⁴ This ambition is a prime source of the appeal of Adam Bede: we take pleasure both in the simplicity of the pastoral world and in the way in which this simplicity is made to imply complexity. The narrator, who refers to Homeric criticism and tells us of his European travels, thereby reminding us of his superiority in experience, in philosophy, and even in social class to his subjects, also points out how the pastoral world contains the fruit of his experience and is in fact a symbolic expression of that experience. The numerous allegorical interpretations of Adam Bede, and of Silas Marner (critically the quickest-dissolving of all of George Eliot's efforts at embodiment), attest to the success with which larger issues, in the most obvious way irrelevant to the novel's remote world, are carried by their pastoral vehicles.

Eliot's primary method of creating her allegory is, like Dinah's, the use of an abstract language provided by Christianity, a language whose limits are, like those of Dinah's vocabulary, confessed: “After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say, as Dinah did, that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are also given to us” (x). Knoepflmacher has suggested that the allegory is Feuerbachian, offering a natural basis for the supernatural language, as in Eliot's use of bread and water, culminating in Adam's last supper.¹⁵ This interpretation can be further borne out by Eliot's use of religious language for secular concepts (e.g. suffering is a “baptism” [xlii]) and by the implicit correspondences she establishes between secular feelings and events and Christianity. One interesting example of the latter is the juxtaposition of Seth's hymn—“Dark and cheerless is the morn / Unaccompanied by thee: / Joyless is the day's return / Till thy mercy's beams I see”—to the description of Adam's happiness in the morning because of his love for Hetty: “His happy love … was to his thoughts what the sweet morning air was to his sensations: it gave him a consciousness of wellbeing that made activity delightful” (xxxviii).

In the allegory of Renaissance pastoral, the artist is a “second God creating a second Nature.”¹⁶ The allegorical critic sees Eliot replacing the idea of God with physical and psychological laws, and ultimately with an abstract and unverifiable Law that is really the artist's will. Adam Bede does suggest, in several ways, a God-like artist. One can go further than Knoepflmacher, who has discussed the futility of foresight and the value of hindsight in the novel, by noting that the narrator's exercise of foresight, borne out by events, places a value on the artistic imagination which Knoepflmacher attributes to memory.¹⁷ The narrator often suggests the potential contained as a seed in any event. Of Arthur's prospects we are told, “many a ‘good fellow,’ through a disastrous combination of circumstances, has undergone a like betrayal”; of Hetty's, “it is too painful to think that she is a woman, with a woman's destiny before her—a woman spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes which may one day close round her and press upon her, a rancorous poisoned garment” (xii, xxii). The proximity of art and religion, upon which the accuracy of such divination rests, is suggested in those passages which associate the transforming powers of love and of art. In explaining Adam's love for Hetty, Eliot writes, “the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman's soul that it clothes. … The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty” (xxxiii). Adam's aesthetic appreciation of his beloved enables him to see beyond her material reality to a higher order.

The author's providence is also implied in the end of the first chapter, “The Workshop,” in which an elderly horseman stops to look at “the stalwart workman.”

Adam, unconscious of the admiration he was exciting, presently struck across the fields, and now broke out into the tune which had all day long been running in his head:—

“Let all thy converse be sincere,
Thy conscience as the noonday clear;
For God's all-seeing eye surveys
Thy secret thoughts, thy works and ways.”

The lines are thematically significant, demonstrating at once Adam's self-righteousness—his ignorance of the complexity which makes the imputation of blame so difficult—and the futility of the many deceptions and moral subterfuges which do occur in the novel. But the close proximity of the all-seeing eye of God and the unknown stare of the stranger (and of the reader, also permitted to see Adam's secret thoughts) suggests that the higher order in Adam's life, of which he cannot be aware, is his participation in the literary work.

To discover the limits of this point of view, we have to return to the other model for the narrator and the novel, and to attempt for a moment the feat that Eliot sustained throughout Adam Bede, and that saves her from the errors of her characters: the simultaneous contemplation of the two contradictory pastoralizing attitudes. The suggestions of allegory and of sophisticated artifice we have just explored work to undermine the pretence of irrelevance we first looked at (as do the very metaphors of the passages insisting on their irrelevance—the canvas of life, Eden, the coffin, the cross, all meaningful human artifacts, the last introduced into the landscape only by the memory of the human viewer). And the claims of irrelevance, of an impenetrable Nature, undermine the pretence of a world controlled and made meaningful.

Eliot builds into the plot itself elements which deny the allegorical meaning we have been pressing toward. The fortunate fall which, following the Christian pattern, should be enacted, does not seem to be. Critics who see such a pattern in the novel balk at Eliot's and her characters' insistence that good cannot come out of evil, or at the incommensurate quality of Hetty's plight and Adam's final marriage to Dinah. But these two objections are related, and become answerable once we reject the Christian premise of a fortunate fall. What is lacking to such a premise in this novel is the adumbration of higher order: Hetty's plight and Adam's marriage are intended to be incommensurate.

There is undeniably a sacrifice at the center of the novel. But the pathos of Hetty is integrally related to the final union. Her sacrifice is not quite a Christian sacrifice of self to God; it is rather extorted than not, and it removes obstacles in the way of earthly rather than heavenly fulfillment. Hetty's ruin does incarnate the failure of sheer, egoistic this-worldliness and materialism, and it is of a power almost sufficient to shift the novel's focus. But she is ultimately a fossil, an “unassimilable fragment.”¹⁸

What Eliot achieves by using this sacrifice as a pivot in her pastoral novel is to make clear the minimal, essential fact out of which religion grows—the renunciation life forces on us—and to offer us not the eternal consolations of religion, nor the temporary and delusive consolations of nostalgia, but the temporary and acknowledged consolations of art. The replacement of Providence by the author's providence is an avowed replacement, not a sleight of hand. By keeping before us the two opposing models of pastoral, Eliot makes us realize that the novel's nostalgic descriptions only reiterate Nature's opacity, and that the intimations of meaning only reveal the human need to create such fictions.

Whether regarded as surface or as symbol, the pastoral world of Adam Bede insists on its distance from a reality independent of human perception. Thus the novel obviates the question of “realism,” as Eliot herself does by her metaphor of the defective mirror—a mirror the faintness or blurring of whose reflection says as much about itself as about what is reflected. As in Tennyson's gardens, the “surface” and the “meaning” of Adam Bede are inseparable: they are equally projected by the perceiver, equally distant from the world of our own immediate knowledge. Thus, the significance of Adam Bede, and the nature of its realism, can be conveyed in a passage that is simply descriptive: that in which the narrator reminisces about the taste of whey.

Ah! I think I taste that whey now—with a flavour so delicate that one can hardly distinguish it from an odour, and with that soft gliding warmth that fills one's imagination with a still, happy dreaminess. And the light music of the dropping whey is in my ears, mingling with the twittering of a bird outside the wire network window—the window overlooking the garden, and shaded by tall Gueldres roses. (xx)

His actual distance from that whey is an image of our distance from it: what should be our most intimate experience can only be words on a page. For what in the seventeenth century was the appropriate genre for intimations of higher order, in the nineteenth has become a genre for expressing doubts about any order higher than that of the artist's work, and any ordering consciousness more comprehensive than the individual mind. Yet, within the novel's accepted illusion, we also taste the whey, as we adumbrate a loving presence behind the novel's world, and certainty in Eliot's repeated “surely.” It was perhaps this special iridescence of the pastoral genre, its constantly dual possibilities, that led Eliot to use it in her first major novel.

Notes

1. Among the many works on this subject are Frank Kermode's introduction to English Pastoral Poetry (London: G. C. Harrap, 1952), pp. 11-44; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), especially chapter 2; Edward William Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964); and Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).

2. Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1974), p. 18.

3. In the former group are R. A. Foakes, “Adam Bede Reconsidered,” English, 12 (1958-59), 173-76; and John Paterson, “Introduction,” Adam Bede, ed. Paterson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968), pp. v-xxxiii (an otherwise commendable introduction). In the latter are Ian Gregor, The Moral and the Story (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), pp. 13-32; Jerome Thale, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 14-16; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 173, 178-80, and Squires. Squires's argument is somewhat ambiguous in this regard. Although at one point he contends that Eliot offers a criticism of the pastoral's idea of the sufficiency of innocence, his main argument is that Eliot alternates anguish and pastoral in order to persuade the reader “to accept the novel's pastoralism as meaningful rather than escapist, significant rather than artificially pretty, since the novel's fictional world does not seem unreal” (p. 83). But since it is, according to Squires, the “anti-pastoral” elements of the novel's world that give it reality, this acceptance can only be self-deluding, although the substitution of “meaningful” for “realistic” evades this issue. A sympathetic discussion of the Theocritean model for the simple pastoral is Thomas G. Rosenmeyer's The Green Cabinet (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969).

4. The allegorical view of Adam Bede is taken by U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), pp. 90-93; John Bayley, “The Pastoral of Intellect,” in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), pp. 199-213; and John Goode, “Adam Bede,” in Critical Essays, pp. 19-41. Bayley's definition of the genre is so broad that it demands neither a rural setting nor a significant landscape.

5. “The Natural History of German Life,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 269-70.

6. Adam Bede, Cabinet ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1878), II, liii, 349. Further references by chapter to Adam Bede in this edition will be given in the text.

7. “The Natural History of German Life,” pp. 273, 274-75, 277, 273. Raymond Williams shows how Eliot's very belief in the existence of English peasants at the turn of the nineteenth century is a sign that she shared in the myth of pastoral, which ignored the actual conditions of farm-workers.

8. Squires, pp. 77-84.

9. Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. by Ernest De Selincourt (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 734-35.

10. Squires has also noted this, following David Ferry; see Squires, p. 42; David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 94-96, 135-43. See also Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's Prelude (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 249.

11. Harold E. Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. 254.

12. Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 189-200. Compare, in Adam Bede, Adam's powerless “counting of the long minutes” as he waits for Hetty's trial (xlii), and the “purposeless tenacity” of Old Poyser's attention to trivial details (xiv).

13. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” in Pastoral and Romance, ed. Eleanor Terry Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 25-46; and “Et in Arcadia Ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (1936; rpt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 223-54.

14. Geoffrey Hartman, “‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun’: A Brief Allegory,” in Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 179. Compare Kitty W. Scoular, Natural Magic (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); and Kathleen Williams, “Courtesy and Pastoral in The Faerie Queene, Book VI,” R.E.S. [Review of English Studies], n.s. 13 (1962), 343.

15. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 55-59.

16. Norman Robkin, “The Holy Sinner and the Confidence Man: Illusion in Shakespeare's Romances,” in Four Essays on Romance, ed. Herschel Baker (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), p. 52.

17. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels, pp. 97-116.

18. The phrase is John Goode's; see “Adam Bede,” p. 25.