ABSTRACT
William Hazlitt, remembering the Greek and Roman origins of the pastoral, and aware that Renaissance interest in the form derived from Italy, did not believe that the English could be good at writing in this mode. In 1818 Hazlitt wrote, ‘We have few good pastorals in the language. Our manners are not Arcadian; our climate is not an eternal spring; our age is not the age of gold’ (Loughrey 1984: 73). He then went on in a characteristically acerbic manner to dismiss, in a sentence each, the work of Sidney, Spenser and Pope. What Hazlitt misunderstood was that the pastoral is a retreat from ‘our manners’, ‘our climate’, ‘our age’, into a literary construct. The reader recognises that the country in a pastoral text is an Arcadia because the language is idealised. In other words, pastoral is a discourse, a way of using language that constructs a different kind of world from that of realism. Sidney, Spenser and Pope may have individually distinctive styles, but they share a discourse that creates for the reader a notion that this text is to be read differently from those of other discourses.
