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The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance.Harry Levin

Harry Levin. The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969. xxiv+231 pp. $6.95. The ancient myth of a primordial era of innocence and abundance, first described by Hesiod (about 800 B.C.) as the golden age of mankind, lived on in Greek philosophy and pastoral lyric; it influenced Latin literature and gave rise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the bucolic genre: a vogue, spreading from Italy over Spain, Portugal, France to England, of stylized love-stories of shepherds and shepherdesses disporting themselves in this age of gold. In devoting himself to an investigation of the golden age myth, Professor Levin does not limit himself to the Renaissance (the heyday of the pastoral), in spite of the title of his study. The special merit of his contribution consists in his exploring the relevance of somehow the entire range of human experience to the concept of the golden age. Although the author disclaims having made an exhaustive study of his topic, with his vast range of scholarship he zigzags through the cultural heritage of the Occident, discovering the golden age motif up to the present day in literature as well as in pageantry, art, philosophy, history, and even in socio-economy. Regarding the unlikely relationship with the economic sphere, Levin contends that, at some period of its progress, the myth of the golden age in the past reverses itself—perhaps first with Jean Bodin —into its opposite, the Utopian dream of the millennium. This permutation is made clear in Milton's Paradise Regained, where 'nostalgia for the past turns to chiliastic dreams of the future'; this in turn leads to the movement of socialism which begins when Saint-Simon calls 'for an immediate effort to shape the future.' Subsequently, the myth of the golden age, 'taken over by the ideologues,' passes through Shelley's effpjrt to combine the past and the future, Byron's sarcastic view of 'old Saturn's reign of sugar-candy,' trails on to Robert Frost, John Berryman, and drops back in time to William Blake; past the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic the myth touches Zola, having now 'aligned itself with the rhetoric of social controversy.' So Levin subsumes not only all dreams of a better past but also all wishful allusions to a better future, either in Utopian dreams or in the socialist call for action, under the concept of the golden age.