The Pastoral Pessimism of William Gilmore Simms

THE PASTORAL PESSIMISM OF WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS Jan Bakker Utah State University In the novels of William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, and in other significant antebellum Southern romances, there is a form within a form. Pastoral is put to use within the framework of romance to provide a subtle commentary upon local, national, and personal experience in such a way as to transform the seeming superficiality of pre-Civil War Southern romantic fiction into something much more meaningful than most readers and critics have recognized. In Simms' pastoral design there is both an acute social commentary and a nagging awareness of the essential tragedy of the American experience. In his romances and certain of his letters and essays, Simms reveals an admiration for "Doing" (as he calls action, change, and progress) as well as a love for the ancient pastoral dream of sequestered green-garden repose and human rejuvenation—this time in an idyllic, agrarian Southland. In this pastoral irresolution appear Simms' deep pessimism and dismay. These result from his ultimate conviction that the restless antipastoral Doer, the intruder into the American plantation garden, will corrupt and spoil any earthly paradise. Woven through the pastoral design of Simms' adventure stories is a Southern version of the American theme formulated beautifully in the familiar Hudson River recollection that closes F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, as Henry Hudson's men look with awe and wonder away from the Half-Moon and out into the passing green and doomed splendor of the New World. In the tradition of modern "inverted" pastoral, which Renato Poggioli describes in The Oaten Flute, Simms' alternately bucolic and blighted landscapes evoke idyll only to deny it. Pastoral weaves a subtle, pessimistic pattern in his fiction that looks toward what CL. Sanford in The Quest for Paradise calls the main theme in American literature of the twentieth century, the dispossession from Paradise.1 Simms' writing shows an unreconciled admiration for both "Northern" industrial action and progress and a yearning for "Southern" agrarian-pastoral repose that reveal a crucial split in his notion of what was best for the nation and his region. This is a dichotomy that points to the New South creed of development and industrialization advocated by Henry Woodfin Grady in the postReconstruction era. It is a dichotomy that turns then toward a quiet 82Notes idyllic vision of the South as a self-contained farming community posited by the Twelve Southerners who contributed essays to ITl Take My Stand in 1930.2 Evidence of this dichotomy—and of Simms' essential and hopeless pastoral bias—occurs in all of his romances. Brief scenes of static, idyllic peace are juxtaposed to larger scenes of action gone strangely awry. This is the heart of his pastoral pessimism. In a pause in the Revolutionary War in The Partisan (1835), for example, Simms describes Swamp Fox Marion's hard-riding dragoons resting near a cool and tranquil roadside spring. Unexpectedly, Simms intrudes his authorial sad voice to muse that man invariably will reject the harmonies of "the bird and the flower" so bent is he "upon earthly strife," as symbolized by war. Yet in The Forayers (1855), Captain Porgy, Simms' comic relief and frequent philosophical spokesman, states in apparent contradiction to the green stasis, the sunlit changelessness of the pastoral ideal, "it is stagnation that is death."3 Guy Rivers, the educated Georgia bandit leader, certainly exemplifies man's destructive preference for strife in the garden. He is one of Simms' many memorable characters, and his criminal spirit dominates the novel Guy Rivers (1834), which is set in the rugged, dangerous north Georgia goldfields of the early nineteenth century. Guy is the first Faust figure to occur in the Southern novel, for Simms describes him as a man who has "that ambition of one who discovers at every step that nothing can be known, yet will not give up the unprofitable pursuit, because even while making the discovery, he still hopes vainly that he may yet, in his own person, give the maxim the lie . . . for ever battling and for ever lost."4In his nihilistic striving for knowledge in his dark forest cave, with his ferocious robberies and murders...