Pastoral and Ideology

540 PETER V. MARINELLI Pastoral and Ideology PETER V. MARINELLI Annabel Patterson. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery University of California Press. xiv, 343, illus. us $45.00 Lowest on the Renaissance ladder ofliterary genres, pastoral in twentieth-century criticism seems to have overleaped a few confining stiles to assert a claim to a certain magnification of its retiring nature. The book under review is very much a case in point. Annabel Patterson has had the happy notion oftracing the changing fortunes over several centuries of one of the most famous of all pastoral texts, Virgil's Eclogues, with special attention to the most poetically resonant of the ten poems, the opening dialogue of Tityrus and Meliboeus; and, matching the open-handedness of the gesture, the University of California Press has accorded her text an elaborate, indeed, in these bad days of diminished authorial expectations, a positively sumptuous, presentation: six colour plates and forty figures delight the reader's eye, providing an opportunity to actually see the artistic materials being scrutinized, materials that form an essential part of the critical discussion and are not merely an occasional adornment of the tale. The work proceeds according to an ambitious plan. Patterson exploits the contemporary vogue for the theme of power by treating the Eclogues as a text in which the impact of the political world upon the privileged world of ease, retirement, and meditation is overtly and repeatedly registered. That much is clear in Virgil himself, with his initial diptych of exiled and favoured shepherds shadowing a world where godlike, distant Caesars dispense otia to some, hardships to others. The author then proceeds to illustrate the remarkable adaptability of this apparently transparent text by reading it as peculiarly adaptable to political manipulation from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, and in a wide variety of cultural circumstances. Fundamentally, the book resolves itself into a series of inquiries into the social premises underlying the constant manipulation of Virgil's pastoral art. Five long complex chapters with numerous subdivisions trace the evolution ofthis movement from Petrarch through Landino and Poliziano, move searchingly into Marot and Spenser, track its appearance in Pope, Voltaire, Chenier, Goldsmith, Crabbe, and Wordsworth, and conclude with glances at the Virgilianism of Frost, Gide, and Valery. (This is a highly selective listing on my part.) In addition, the author ranges knowledgeably into the world of the illustrations by which the various versions of the Eclogues were accompanied and illuminated over the centuries, and the art of Simone Martini, Sebastian Brant, William Blake, and Aristide Maillo!, among a good many others, is 'read' as part of the total Virgilian picture. The richness of the materials offered the reader is undeniable; nevertheless, it makes difficulties for the reviewer attempting to cast some kind of critical net over the variety and comprehensiveness of it all. For one thing, the author's comparativist expertise in Latin, English, Italian, French, and German literature is UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 AGAINST THEORY 541 likely to impose a severe strain on the ability of her readers. to assess the total complex arising from her consideration of Virgilian commentators, translators, imitators, illustrators. For another, the local density of some of these chapters deflects attention from the overview that, no doubt conscious of the dangers inherent in this kind of extended survey, she insists the reader bear always in mind. Inevitably, however, especially in the last two chapters, the rhythm and sweep of the earlier ones seem a bit diminished; the structure of the arch is still in view, but one is more likely to be aware of its separate segments: the readings of Pope and Frost, for example, emerge very much as blocks that can stand on their own, apart from their place in the scheme. Pastoral and Ideology is a book that will appeal to a great variety of scholars and specialists, unlikely though it is that anyone of them will possess the overall command of the material that the author has acquired in her committed pursuit of her theme. Her immersion in her research is everywhere evident, as is her thoughtfulness and seriousness. She strikes out independent positions of her own...