The Romantic movement, the first outcry of protest against the new age, captured its sense of historical dislocation in images contrasting the countryside and the city, innocence and experience, the vanishing world of "springing pastures" and "feeding kine," in the words of Matthew Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy," and the metropolis with "its sick hurry, its divided aims, its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts"—"this strange disease of modern life." In an "age of change," as John Stuart Mill called it in his I83I essay "The Spirit of the Age," the "idea of comparing one's own age with former ages" had for the first time become an inescapable mental habit; Mill referred to it as the "dominant idea" of the nineteenth century. For some, the "spirit of the age" was altogether odious; for others, "a subject of exultation"; but the important point, as Mill noted with great insight, was that the issue should be joined in these terms at all. "The 'spirit of the age,' " he added, "is ... a novel expression, no more than fifty years old."

Once the pastoral vision came to be associated with an actual period of historical time—with the allegedly flourishing or at least familiar and manageable agrarian society that was beginning to be destroyed by indus

____________________

claim to have reestablished a connection with the land, Berman insisted, just because he now lived on a farm. "Even if his farm and his work on it are real, there is something unreal about what it means to him.... It can never be his life." His allusions to his own experience did not "quite ring true." After all, he had left the north of England by choice—not because he was dispossessed by grasping landlords or capitalists but because he needed to go to the city if he was to get an education and to make a career as a writer. "For a man dispossessed, Williams has done pretty well for himself'—a Cambridge professorship, a series of highly acclaimed books. "The knot that bound him to the land, and to his past, has been cut and he himself has helped to cut it. To believe that he can tie it again now ... is to create yet another form of pastoral—and another mystification. Like the rest of us, Williams must live with his nostalgic yearning ; the green fields of his childhood ... are forever beyond his reach." Thus Berman forced the discussion back into the very categories from which Williams had tried to rescue it.

-87-