Although the pastoral scenes in his tiction are most obviously influenced by Hardy and Lawrence, John Fowles provides a larger context for understanding his fictional use of this mode in Daniel Martin (1977). Describing his feelings about his cottage near his birthplace in Devon, the narrator-protagonist generalizes that the pastoral mode creates “a place outside the normal world, intensely private and enclosed, intensely green and fertile, numinous, haunted and haunting, dominated by a sense of magic that is also a sense of a mysterious yet profound parity in all existence.”’The recurrence of the mode “again and again in literature and in art, in one form or another, from the sublimities of the Garden on Eden and the Forest of Arden to the 1930s hokum of James Hilton’s Shangri-La” is itself evidence that the pastoral feeling Fowles is describing “is one of those experiences that go well beyond the literary.” Two seemingly contradictory feelings characterize this numinous world: on the one hand, it is intensely “private and enclosed”; on the other, the green world is public and even democratic, insofar as it evokes the “mysterious yet profound parity in all existence.” The private and public aspects of the pastoral experience are similarly evident in Daniel Martin’s discussion of Monsieur Nicholas, his own, personal literary “source” for the pastoral. Soon after Nicholas’ father discovers “la bonne uaux,” he comes to view the hidden combe as

“‘his’ valley.” Later he consecrates the area with a gathering of “young shepherds and shepherdesses, feeling ‘the state of man before kings and laws and prohibitions.’” The discrepancy between the