Any consideration of the pastoral mode today involves us in questions of very awkward accommodation. As a matter of fact, there are two traditions not susceptible of extension into modern literature, at least not in any pure manner. These are the epic and the pastoral…. Both epic and pastoral conceive of human character as being perfectly revealed in action. Homer and Theocritus clearly believed that was so; we do not. It is questionable whether even Virgil could quite believe Homer's credo, and we are very likely to approve of the Aeneid at those moments when a psychological strangeness subsumes the heroic movement. We do not believe in action as the great revealer, largely because we cannot feel sure that meaningful action is possible. Hence, adaptations of epic in modern literature convert action to symbol, and the symbol itself is subjugated to quarrelsome oppositions, is diluted by irony, and...