Free The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble Page A

authentic country child, so it is strange that her version of the pastoral seems, at times, so unconvincing. The question of authenticity and artificiality has attached itself to the pastoral since the form was invented over two thousand years ago; indeed, the form is itself a question, forever playing the real against the unreal, the brutal against the idyllic, the true country against the town's idea of the country.
    These queries are raised even by the work of John Clare, who was indisputably an authentic countryman. Clare at one point proposed the title
The Midsummer Cushion
for a volume of his poetry, although it was never adopted. It was, he hoped, an attractive title, and referred to an old custom among villagers in summer time of sticking 'a piece of greensward full of field flowers and place it as an ornament in their cottages, which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions'. Such a pretty custom might well have been recorded with approval by Alison Uttley as a cottage survival. But Clare's upper-class patron Eliza Emmerson needed to have the phrase explained to her, and although she at first liked it, she began to have doubts about it, and the volume was eventually, and less quaintly, published as
The Rural Muse.
The real was becoming unreal even during its own lifespan.
    There was a pronounced, nostalgic, Georgian strain in Uttley's writing. (She was an admirer and later a friend of Walter de la Mare, one of the best-known writers of the group that flourished during the reign of George V; it included John Drinkwater, John Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie, Edmund Blunden and W H. Davies.) Some critics have dismissed the whole Georgian pastoral movement as one of infantile regression and a denial of the onward march of urban life and industry. (In fact, in her London youth, somewhat improbably, Uttley had been influenced and befriended by Ramsay MacDonald and his wife Margaret, but with age her views became more conservative, though not necessarily, as we have seen, more orthodox.) The Georgian poets connected the countryside with childhood, and their work prompted in some quarters a suspicion that being interested in childhood, or writing for and about children, is in itself childish. T. S. Eliot, writing in
The Dial
in 1927 on a book by Blunden about the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, produces what is intended to be a devastating condemnation of the concept of Vaughan's 'angel infancy'.
    Eliot writes:
It does not occur to Mr Blunden that the love of one's childhood, a passion which he appears to share with Lamb and Vaughan, is anything but a token of greatness. We all know the mood; and we can, if we choose to relax to that extent, indulge in the luxury of the reminiscence of childhood; but if we are at all mature or conscious, we refuse to indulge this weakness to the point of writing or poetizing about it. We know that it is something to be buried and done with, though its corpse will from time to time find its way up to the surface.
    Eliot continues in this vein for some paragraphs, accusing Blunden of attempting to re-create Vaughan in his own image as 'a mild
pastoral poet – that is to say, a poet who, enjoying fresh air and green hillsides, occupies himself in plastering nature with his own fancies'. Blunden's praise for Vaughan's religious sense of 'solar, personal, flower-whispering, rainbow-browed, ubiquitous, magnanimous Love' understandably gets short shrift in Eliot's critique, but Vaughan himself, now considered one of the greatest poets of the seventeenth century, does not emerge with much more credit; the emotion in his poetry is described by Eliot as 'vague, adolescent, fitful, and retrogressive'. These are harsh words. That word 'retrogressive' is particularly damaging, coming as it does from the Modernist who did so much to reinstate the Metaphysical poets. One would have thought that Eliot would have responded more warmly to Vaughan's religious verse, and his description of childhood as a