Mod. Phil. P.Q. S. in Ph. = = = = = Modern Language Notes. - Notes and Queries. Oxford University Press. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. = Philological Quarterly. By J. R. R. TOLKIEN, M.A., Rawlinson and By H. J. C. GRIERSON, D.Litt., F.B.A., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh, and ARTHUR XII. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER. II 305 By H. V. ROUTH, M.A., Reader in English I LITERARY HISTORY AND CRITICISM GENERAL WORKS [BY C. H. HERFORD] We begin by noticing two or three books devoted to the fundamental questions of literature. 1 Professor Abercrombie describes his little volume, The Idea of Great Poetry as 'a kind of sequel' to his previous essays on the Theory of Art' and the Theory of Poetry', applying the methods and principles there stated to a specific critical problem. The problem is not, as such problems mostly are, academic. On the contrary he starts, like Aristotle (and F. H. Bradley), with a term that is on everybody's lips, and subjects it to a subtle and illuminating analysis. Vaguely as we use the epithet, we have some distinction in view, he assumes, when we call poetry 'great'. But what precisely do we mean, and what at bottom constitutes this 'greatness' in poetry? Some inadequate answers are first ruled out. 'Perfection' may be found in an epigram or neat copy of verses; 'passion' may be merely vehement. But help is found in Sappho, and in Longinus' description of her 'concourse of passions' and of sensations in the fusing intensity of a single experience. Concentration of a many-sided apprehension of life in a white heat of personality'-this, in brief, is Abercrombie's notion of 'great' poetry, and his book is a prolonged exposition, strewn with felicitous and often unusual examples, of its implications. There is daring, perhaps a little defiance, in the choice of his first examples, from Dante. For it is not the later Dante-the safe gold-mine to which any ordinary quester would turn-but the 'unregenerate', passion-fraught Dante of the Sixth Canzone, where love and rage, anguish and rapture, throng together into a single moment of intensely personal experience. We confess to some doubt about 'richness' however 'concentrated', as an absolute criterion; Mr. Abercrombie's language here hovers on the verge of a kind of 1 The Idea of Great Poetry, by Lascelles Abercrombie. Secker. pp. 232. 6s. materialism which recalls the medieval trouble about seven angels on the point of a needle; is it the vast plenty of things wrought into harmony in the Iliad which makes us feel it greater' (if we do) than a sonnet, equally splendid in imagination, but of a divine simplicity? Should we not recognize different categories of 'greatness'? Abercrombie's position, however, fortifies his just repudiation of the current heresy that poetry is essentially lyrical. He is here again Aristotelian; and it is easy to recognize this affinity both in his conception of a poem as ' a single complexity of things', and in his doctrine of its ideal significance. But he goes his own way in the distinction (only possible for us post-romantics) between two poetic modes of possessing this ideal significance: 'the poetry of Refuge' and the 'poetry of Interpretation'. The familiarity of the distinction (under other names) in no way detracts from the value of Abercrombie's comments on the Decameron, Theocritus, Spenser, the Witch of Atlas, on the one hand, and Prometheus Unbound and Leopardi, on the other. The third lecture turns to the other aspect of the thesis, the concentration of thought and passion in a 'personal' experience. And here he finds to his hand a poet who was capable perhaps of a larger interpretation of life than any other in our modern literature', and who had focused his interpretation in a poetic image of the growth of his own mind. No doubt the magnificent horizons contemplated in The Prelude and The Recluse were never to be reached; and it says much for Abercrombie's openness of mind that, though Wordsworth never achieved the creation of a poem informed with the complete expression of his characteristic harmony of experience, ' as Shelley, relying on a much less potent idea, did in Prometheus Unbound', he yet puts him certainly 'third of English poets'. Moreover, he 'came very near it once: and perhaps this partial achievement of Wordsworth's is the greatest thing in modern poetry; it is surely the loftiest. Is there, outside Dante and Milton, anything really comparable with the Ode on Intimations of Immortality?' A less familiar example of the focusing of diverse experience is described at length in the clashing Hellenism and Hebraism of The Wisdom of Solomon, and a more neglected one in the conflict of the mundane and the spiritual in Paradise Regained. And in |