Yet the eventual structure of feeling is not based only on an idea of the happier past. It is based on that other and associated idea of innocence: the rural innocence of the pastoral, neo-pastoral and reflective poems. The key to its analysis is the contrast of the country with the city and the court: here nature, there worldliness. This contrast depends, often, on just the suppression of work in the countryside, and of the property relations through which this work is organised, which we have already observed. But there are other elements in the contrast. The means of agricultural production - the fields, the woods, the growing crops, the animals - are attractive to the observer and, in many ways and in the good seasons, to the men working in and among them. They can then be effectively contrasted with the exchanges and counting houses of mercantilism, or with the mines, quarries, mills and manufactories of industrial production. That contrast in many ways still holds in experience.
But there is also, throughout, an ideological separation between the processes of rural exploitation, which have been, in effect, dissolved into a landscape, and the register of exploitation, in the law courts, the money markets, the political power and the conspicuous expenditure of the city.
The rhetorical contrast between town and country is indeed traditional: Quintillian (c.35 - c.100 CE) makes it his first example of a stock thesis, and conventional contrasts between greed and innocence in these characteristic locations are commonplace in later Greek and Latin literature. But it was especially in relation to Rome that the contrast crystallised, at the point where the city could be seen as an independent organism. In the savage satires of Juvenal we find the tone which is more than conventional: a sustained and specific catalogue of corruption:
This teeming life of flattery and bribery, of organised seduction, of noise and traffic, with the streets unsafe because of robbers, with the crowded rickety houses and the constant threat of fire, is the city as itself; going its own way. A retreat to the country or the coast, from this kind of hell, is then a different vision from the mere contrast of rural and urban ways of life. It is of course a rentier's vision: the cool country that is sought is not the country of the working farmer but of the fortunate resident. The rural virtues are there, but as a memory as in Satire XIV:
The true history of the English countryside has been centred thoughout in the problems of property in land, and in the consequent social and working relationships. By the eighteenth century, nearly half of the cultivated land was owned by some five thousand families. As a central form of this predominance, four hundred families, in a population of some seven or eight million people, owned nearly a quarter of cultivated land. Beneath this domination, there was no longer, in any classical sense, a peasantry, but an increasingly regular structure of tenant farmers and wage-labourers: the social relationships that we can properly call those of agrarian capitalism. The regulation of production was increasingly in the terms of an organised market.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p. 60]
But there is also, throughout, an ideological separation between the processes of rural exploitation, which have been, in effect, dissolved into a landscape, and the register of exploitation, in the law courts, the money markets, the political power and the conspicuous expenditure of the city.
The rhetorical contrast between town and country is indeed traditional: Quintillian (c.35 - c.100 CE) makes it his first example of a stock thesis, and conventional contrasts between greed and innocence in these characteristic locations are commonplace in later Greek and Latin literature. But it was especially in relation to Rome that the contrast crystallised, at the point where the city could be seen as an independent organism. In the savage satires of Juvenal we find the tone which is more than conventional: a sustained and specific catalogue of corruption:
What I do in Rome? I never learned how
To lie.
This teeming life of flattery and bribery, of organised seduction, of noise and traffic, with the streets unsafe because of robbers, with the crowded rickety houses and the constant threat of fire, is the city as itself; going its own way. A retreat to the country or the coast, from this kind of hell, is then a different vision from the mere contrast of rural and urban ways of life. It is of course a rentier's vision: the cool country that is sought is not the country of the working farmer but of the fortunate resident. The rural virtues are there, but as a memory as in Satire XIV:
Old mountains peasants
Used to tell their sons...
Be content with a humble cottage...
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 46-47]
It is interesting how separations are created between the city and the country from both sides. The city dwellers often wish the country to conform to an old fashioned ideal that they would not necessarily wish to see operating in the city, acting as a brake on its dynamism. It is easy from a country point of view to see the city as crowded and frantic. However, as I have said there is a continuity of experience between the country and the city with a constant movement of people, goods and ideas between the two. The apparent separation created by these ideas disguises the continuities.
Thus in Jonson's poem to Wroth we can feel the contrast between the country gentleman and the worldly men of the city. But what are the lawyers doing, much of the time, if not proving titles to land? A large part of what is being passed across the exchanges is the surplus value of the unregarded labourers at home, and as trade developed, abroad. And as the moneyed order of the city extends in importance, where does much of the capital go but back to the land, to intensify the exploiting process? The greed and calculation, so easily isolated and condemned in the city, run back, quite clearly to the country houses, with their fields and their labourers around them. And this is a double process. The exploitation of the land and of nature, which takes place in the country, is realised and concentrated on the city. But also, the profits of other kinds of exploitation - the accumulating wealth of the merchant, the lawyer, the court favourite - come to penetrate the country, as if, but only as if, they were a new social phenomenon. As was said in 1577, about the merchants:
They often exchange estates with gentlemen as gentlemen do
with them; by virtual conversion of one to the other.
That virtual conversion is the whole point. There is a common way of seeing the social process of this period as a kind of infection of the city:
from which (as it were a from a certain rich and wealthy seedplot) courtiers, lawyers and merchants be continuously transplanted.
Well certainly Penhurst is such a case. But a real conflict of interest , between those settled on the land and those settled in the city, which continually defined itself in the shifting economy of the time, could be made the basis of an ideology, in which an innocent and and traditional order was being invaded and destroyed by a new and more ruthless order.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 48-49]
This is where the idea of a 'traditional' order is most effectively misleading. For there is no innocence in the established proprietors, at any particular time, unless we ourselves choose to put it there. Very few titles to property could bear humane investigation, in the long process of conquest, theft, political intrigue, courtiership, extortion and the power of money. It is a deep and persistent illusion to suppose that time confers on these familiar processes of acquisition an innocence which can be contrasted with the ruthlessness of subsequent stages of the same essential drives.
The 'ancient stocks', to which we are sentimentally referred, are only ordinarily those families who had been pressing and exploiting their neighbours rather longer. And the 'intruders', the new men, were entering and intensifying a system that was already established and which, by its internal pressures, was developing new forms of predation. If we have humanity to spare, it is better directed to the unregarded men who were making and working the land, in any event, under the old owners and the new...
Of course a city eats what its country neighbours have grown. It is able to do so by the services it provides, its political authority, law and trade, to those who are in charge of the rural exploitation, with whom, characteristically, it is linked in a mutual necessity of profit and power. But then, at marginal points, as the processes of the city become in some respects self-generating, and especially in the course of foreign conquests and trade, there is a new basis for the contrast between one 'order' and another. The agents of power and profit become, as it were, alienated, and in certain political situations can be become dominant. Over and above the interlocking exploitation, there is what can be be seen as a factual exploitation of the country as a whole by the city as a whole.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 50-51]
Thus in Jonson's poem to Wroth we can feel the contrast between the country gentleman and the worldly men of the city. But what are the lawyers doing, much of the time, if not proving titles to land? A large part of what is being passed across the exchanges is the surplus value of the unregarded labourers at home, and as trade developed, abroad. And as the moneyed order of the city extends in importance, where does much of the capital go but back to the land, to intensify the exploiting process? The greed and calculation, so easily isolated and condemned in the city, run back, quite clearly to the country houses, with their fields and their labourers around them. And this is a double process. The exploitation of the land and of nature, which takes place in the country, is realised and concentrated on the city. But also, the profits of other kinds of exploitation - the accumulating wealth of the merchant, the lawyer, the court favourite - come to penetrate the country, as if, but only as if, they were a new social phenomenon. As was said in 1577, about the merchants:
They often exchange estates with gentlemen as gentlemen do
with them; by virtual conversion of one to the other.
That virtual conversion is the whole point. There is a common way of seeing the social process of this period as a kind of infection of the city:
from which (as it were a from a certain rich and wealthy seedplot) courtiers, lawyers and merchants be continuously transplanted.
Well certainly Penhurst is such a case. But a real conflict of interest , between those settled on the land and those settled in the city, which continually defined itself in the shifting economy of the time, could be made the basis of an ideology, in which an innocent and and traditional order was being invaded and destroyed by a new and more ruthless order.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 48-49]
This is where the idea of a 'traditional' order is most effectively misleading. For there is no innocence in the established proprietors, at any particular time, unless we ourselves choose to put it there. Very few titles to property could bear humane investigation, in the long process of conquest, theft, political intrigue, courtiership, extortion and the power of money. It is a deep and persistent illusion to suppose that time confers on these familiar processes of acquisition an innocence which can be contrasted with the ruthlessness of subsequent stages of the same essential drives.
The 'ancient stocks', to which we are sentimentally referred, are only ordinarily those families who had been pressing and exploiting their neighbours rather longer. And the 'intruders', the new men, were entering and intensifying a system that was already established and which, by its internal pressures, was developing new forms of predation. If we have humanity to spare, it is better directed to the unregarded men who were making and working the land, in any event, under the old owners and the new...
Of course a city eats what its country neighbours have grown. It is able to do so by the services it provides, its political authority, law and trade, to those who are in charge of the rural exploitation, with whom, characteristically, it is linked in a mutual necessity of profit and power. But then, at marginal points, as the processes of the city become in some respects self-generating, and especially in the course of foreign conquests and trade, there is a new basis for the contrast between one 'order' and another. The agents of power and profit become, as it were, alienated, and in certain political situations can be become dominant. Over and above the interlocking exploitation, there is what can be be seen as a factual exploitation of the country as a whole by the city as a whole.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 50-51]
The true history of the English countryside has been centred thoughout in the problems of property in land, and in the consequent social and working relationships. By the eighteenth century, nearly half of the cultivated land was owned by some five thousand families. As a central form of this predominance, four hundred families, in a population of some seven or eight million people, owned nearly a quarter of cultivated land. Beneath this domination, there was no longer, in any classical sense, a peasantry, but an increasingly regular structure of tenant farmers and wage-labourers: the social relationships that we can properly call those of agrarian capitalism. The regulation of production was increasingly in the terms of an organised market.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p. 60]
No comments:
Post a Comment