nineteenth centuries not only historicized nostalgia but democratized it as well. The pastoral convention declined with the decline of aristocracy, but the pastoral mood became far more pervasive than before, now that the town-country contrast appeared to define successive stages of historical development. ^* Urbanization reflected the growth of commerce, more efficient systems of production and distribution, rising standards of comfort, a rapid increase in the circulation of knowledge—progress, in short, the other side of which appeared to lie in the loss of an earlier simplicity. Since progress affected everybody, drawing people to the city in larger and larger numbers, it created a broad new audience for a metropolitan literature more explicitly retrospective than pastoralism, one that concerned itself not with an imaginary rural retreat but with an actual historical process (as people had come to think of it), the eradication of unspoiled nature by the irresistible forces of progressive change.

It is the assumption that those forces were irresistible that links nineteenth-century agrarian nostalgia to the pastoral tradition and explains why a lament for the vanishing countryside could so easily coexist with the celebration of historical progress, just as the praise of pastoral scenes had coexisted with an appreciation of the fashionable refinements of the court. For middle-class metropolitan readers, the charm of the old agrarian order lay principally in the unlikelihood that any part of it would survive the onslaught of industrialism. The pastoral legacy, transferred now to the pseudo-debate between advocates of progress and those who

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The pastoral genre played off idyllic images of country life not so much against the city as against the court—a further indication that it was addressed to a sophisticated, aristocratic audience. It was against the artifice, intrigue, affectation, and insincerity of the court that the artless love play of shepherds and milkmaids appeared so engaging by contrast. When the country came to be seen from the point of view of the city as such, nostalgic depictions of country life began to pay more attention to the social conditions said to be characteristic of the village and the countryside—the absence of envy and resentment, the reciprocal solicitude of rich and poor, the organic solidarity of neighbors. "In country towns," wrote an Englishwoman in 1868, "the gentry and the poor are far less separate than in great cities, and the local interest and local work serve to unite class and class.... A small sphere throws men of different classes closely together, and creates a bond of fellowship utterly unknown to the inhabitants of a great city."

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