Although the pastoral convention always drew on images of a golden age, it did little to shape perceptions of history, precisely because it did not pretend to locate the Arcadian idyll anywhere else than in the imagination. In "A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry," Alexander Pope urged that it be kept as artificial and fanciful as possible. The contrast between town and country, moreover—even if anyone took it to refer to actual social conditions—was spatial rather than temporal; and it was only when the contrast began to be historicized, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that nostalgia began to color the way men and women thought about the historical past.

Before that time, historical speculation was dominated, to be sure, by conceptual schemes (classical or Christian) that tended to equate historical change with degeneration, as we have seen; yet it would be a mistake to call them nostalgic. Neither the Christian call to repentance nor the republican appeal to former glory encouraged people to seek refuge from the present in thoughts of the past; nor did the austere ideal of personal conduct shared by both these traditions have much in common with a cult of idyllic simplicity that took for granted the impossibility of its attainment. Christian and republican views of history implied a program of moral renovation. Imaginary visits to Arcadia, on the other hand, left the visitor refreshed but otherwise unchanged, resigned to the weary world as it was and by no means completely dissatisfied, indeed, with a world the sophistication of which alone made it possible to appreciate untutored simplicity. The celebration of rustic felicity was never intended for rustics. It could be savored only by people of refinement who did not seriously propose, after all, to exchange the advantages of breeding and worldly experience for a life close to nature, no matter how lyrically they sang nature's praises. Nostalgia, in its pastoral form at least, was a luxury only the favored could afford to indulge, just as their spiritual descendants indulge a taste for handmade goods in a world dominated by machine production.

The transformation of historical consciousness in the eighteenth and

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