E. WARWICK SLINNsensuality, gives way to the obvious conventionality of an abstract pastoral:
"silver'd branches of the glade" (214), "forest-skirts" (215), "moonlit
pales" (216), and "dark dingles" (220). Thus the formal structure of the
poem articulates an opposition. This opposition is between the ideal
(represented by the life of the gypsies and the scholar who left Oxford in
order to join them) and the real (contemporary social conditions, character-
ized by images of sickness and disease).
What becomes apparent in "The Scholar-Gipsy" is that the cultural basis
for positing the conditions of aesthetic idealism was more and more in
doubt. Although it was still possible amid the emerging industrialism of
Victorian cities to walk in the woods and renew acquaintance with pastoral
surroundings (such as the Cumnor Hills outside Oxford where Arnold's
poet-speaker reads Glanvill's book), it was no longer possible to literalize
the values of earlier neoclassical convention and establish the countryside
as a referent for the pastoral. Instead, the pronounced imitation of Keatsian
stanzas, notably those of "Ode to a Nightingale" (1820), implodes upon
their structural division. Arnold also shifts the trimeter (surrounded by
pentameters) to the sixth line, instead of Keats's eighth. This more central
position of the short line within ten-line stanzas produces the formal
condition for a turn, one that encourages antithesis ("But when the fields
are still" [6]) and opposition ("Here will I sit and wait" [16]). Resolution in
any organic sense proves difficult because the aesthetic and formal means
of such unity (the literary conventions and metaphors of past ideals) remain
unavailable: their cultural currency is no longer underwritten by what
Arnold later claimed as the poetic gold standard - the guarantor of the
"idea" as referent.
The speaker in "The Scholar-Gipsy" acknowledges this insufficiency of
the idea when he reaches the emotive climax of the poem, instructing the
scholar-gypsy to flee his "feverish contact" (221) - contact that would
infect the disease-free scholar. The speaker is tied irrevocably to the
contemporary social world, one whose mental life has been infected by the
disease of "sick hurry" and "divided aims" (204). In order to sustain the
scholar's contrasting unity of purpose ("one aim, one business, one
desire'^152]), he must keep the scholar separate in a world of literary
idealism located on "some mild pastoral slope" where the scholar may
"listen with enchanted ears, / ... to the nightingales!" (219-20). But the
idea of the pastoral (the slope and the nightingales) refers to no contem-
porary reality and therefore cannot exist for the poet-speaker in his modern
world. Arnold's determination to attach poetic emotion to the idea requires
the speaker in this poem to sustain a painful dichotomy between literary
idea and historical truth. Any formal poetic construction of pastoral
54