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Monday 1 December 2008

Earls of Paradise

Too much in Arcadia

Blair Worden on Adam Nicolson's new book

I fear that Nicolson, in studying a ‘dream of perfection’, has done some imagining of his own. Other favourite words are ‘organic’ and ‘organism’. He celebrates the ‘organic unity’ and ‘organic integrity’ of a society ‘alive with a sense of jointness, of a joint enterprise between the different connected parts of the social organism’. Admittedly the ideal often collided with realities of suffering or cruelty or injustice. By the Civil War, in any case, the ‘mechanisms’ of the ‘organism’ were not being ‘properly oiled’, and ‘the mutuality had gone’. But the price England paid is evident in the 18th century, when great estates had ‘lost’ their social ‘soul’. The countryside was turned into mere décor and was dressed in ‘a Savile Row suit’.

I don’t know where he gets all this from. There is much to savour in his keenly felt and delicately phrased descriptions of landscape and agricultural activity, of Wilton House, of members of the Pembroke family and of their portraits, and much in them for the visitor to that part of the world to learn and observe. But his historical framework is a muddle. The most insistent terms of the book are ‘Arcadia’ and ‘Arcadian’, which, as he deploys them, align a vision of stress-free social coordination with a yearning for perfection of landscape. Arcadia was a rugged mountainous region of the Peloponnese to which Theocritus and Virgil had given a pastoral literary identity, and which the Renaissance imagination made into a place of beauty. Nicolson’s prompt is the composition at Wilton around 1580 of some — we don’t know how much — of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, the brother-in-law of the second Earl of Pembroke, a moment that made Wilton the ‘headquarters’ of Arcadianism. But the claim that Sidney’s account of the Arcadian countryside ‘is a description of 16th- century Wiltshire’ is shaky, and anyway the landscape is almost the only commendable thing about his Arcadia, a fraught and disintegrating society. Sidney was not alone in giving pastoral poetry, which the Renaissance made a choice instrument of social and political criticism, an Arcadian setting. Milton did it in his masque Arcades. But Arcadia figures far less prominently in Renaissance discussions of politics or society than you might guess from Nicolson’s language.

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