Kelley wrote:
>
> "One day, I am going to drop everything and think exclusively about America
> and its celebrated 'loss of innocence'. I have read that the country lost
> said innocence in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the First
> World War, during Prohibition, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the McCarthy
> hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery
> (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the
> Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were
> recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma
> City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is fairly easily
> regained - only to be (damn!) mislaid once more."
>
See for a nice analogue Raymond Williams, _The Country and the City_, pp. 9ff.
He tells of being sent a book on the country, which contained at the beginning the sentence: "A way of life that has come down to us from the days of Virgil has suddenly ended." It had happened since WW 1. "A whole culture that had preserved its continuity from earliest times had now received its quietus."
And then Williams remembers Leavis & Thomson, _Culture and Environment_ (1932) "The 'organic community' of 'Old England' had disappeared; 'the change is very recent indeed.'" But George Sturt in 1911 had written "of the rural England 'that is dying out now.' Just back, we can see, over the last hill."
When did that occur: enclosure after 1861 and residential settletemtn after 1900.
But Thos. Hardy's novels (between 1871 and 1896), referring to rural England since the 1830s. Critics found the change recorded in Hardy. But in 1870s Richard Jeffries had said "there had been more change in rural England in the previous half century" than in any previous time. The 1820s were the last years of Cobbett, looking back to a happier time during the 1770s and 1780s. But his happier times were the times of Crabbe's "The Village" (1783) and Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," which would take us back to the 1750s as that happy time.
Skipping a little, he notes that Philip Massinger, in the 1620s was making the same wail, the corruption of an earlier rural civilization. . . .And of course More, 1516. Which gets us back to the Middle AGes, and Langland's Piers Plowman, bewailing how greedy and uppity the contemprary laborers were. Then the free Saxon world before the Conquest. And we're back almost to Eden. Always that "organic" ("innocent") world just over the last hill.
Theocritus (c. 250 b.c.e.)
All rich delight and luxury was there:
Larks and bright finches singing in the air;
The brown bees flying round about the well; And so forth.
The organic life "in touch with the earth" has been lost much more often than American Innocence. :-)
And there are still readers of Eliot today who take his bewailing the loss (in the 17th century) of a "unified sensibility" seriously.
And a Milton critic in the 1940s spoke of "massive, unchallengeable synthesis of knowledge," inherited from the middle ages and recapitulated by Milton, that was "far richer and far more reassuring than the fragile, limited substitutes which have replaced it."
And in a current book on the 17th century a literary critic is claiming that everything went to pot in the 17th century when efficient causes replaced final causes (that being the main sin of capitalism).
Nostalgia knows no limits.
Carrol