THE BUSINESS OF POETRY.
CsocE's rebellion against the dead hand of irrelevant inquiry and analysis has gone too far, but it has certainly brought new life into literary criticism. A work of art has a unique existence of its own, but it is also a child of life ; to study it, therefore, in vacuo is an impossible ideal, because its roots, if not its branches, are in nature, and nature has no use for vacuums. Similarly to deny any distinction between sub- stance and form, merging the two in the miracle of an instan- laneous expressive act, is one of those absolutist theories which, if satisfying to the philosopher, are contradicted by *)ractical experience. Every artist knows that there are two aspects to the creative act, conception and realization, and between the two there is almost invariabl) a great gulf Ixed which has to be painfully bridged from each side. Nevertheless, Croce has only erred in going too far. His Aesthetic is invaluable for enforcing the truth that in signi- ficant art the form is intimately related to the creative impulse, that it is the condition of expressive imagination and not merely a technical artifice.
Mr. Abercrombie has already in his Theory of Art formulated an Aesthetic, which redresses the balance of Croce's error, while preserving his truth. In the present volume, which incorporates the essence of lectures delivered in the Univer- sities of Liverpool and Leeds, he applies that theory with brilliant results to the practical elucidation of poetry, working his way from a detailed study of the poetic process to a demonstration of the poetic essence. The devout Crocean would argue that the process and the essence are not only involved, but indistinguishable. Mr. Abercrombie, being a poet, admits the former, but denies the latter. Inspir- ation, as he has no difficulty in showing, dictates the form of art, but form also modifies the inspiration, and it is by tracing the subtle interplay of this dualism that we relate the surface of a work of art to the depths, or in Mr. Abercrombie's own words, pass "from the means of poetry to something at least of its purpose : from technique to its motive, from the surface of the poetic world to its inner nature."
Perhaps only the Professor who is also a practising poet has the power to do that ; yet few poets, it is safe to say, have Mr. Abercrombie's ability to explain the impulses of poetry in the arguments of prose, or to define emotion in the terms of intellect. It is this rare combination of creative and critical faculties which has enabled him to preserve so justly the balance between the idealistic and materialistic aspect of the question and to produce a study of poetry which, in the significant unity of its insight and its argument, is itself a work of art and will surely rank amongst the great achievements of English criticism.
His method is governed by the philosophic principles, which we have briefly adduced. He attacks the poetic world in turn from its centre and its circumference.
and in a last chapter he seeks to summarize the characteristics of the whole. The centre of art is its inspiration, the creative urge that peremptorily demands expression. Mi. Abercrombie .explains it with happy illus- tration, both in its general and particular aspects, as a force and as an object, an idea and a substance. Art's circum- ference is its form, a clothing of which the style and measure- ments, like any suit of -clothes, are equally dictated by the wearer's figure and the tailor's handicraft. For, as Mr. Abercrombie is careful to say, "by the art (of a poem) I do not mean simply the clothing of the matter in language ; I mean as well something that happened to the matter before that process could begin." It is upon this basis that he proceeds to examine form and diction, the meaning of words
• and their sound, and so, avoiding completely that kind of critical autopsy which treats of technique as an end in itself, he reveals it rather as the vital process by which the creative impulse seeks its most effective utterance. We cannot speak too highly of the exactitude of Mr. Abercrombie's exposition. Philosophical as he is and must be (for imagination cannot adequately be defined in other than philosophical terms), lie is intensely human and logical too: He has succeeded in defining poetical experience without consulting either the Professional psychologist or metaphysician, and in his last chapter the world of personal experience which he has so subtly analysed assumes beneath his hands a beautiful and universal form. It is a world, in his own words, "into which nothing, not even evil itself, can come except in the interests of the whole, as a tone necessary for the establishment of fullest harmony . . . a world of perfectly coherent and indestructible inter-relationship." Possibly, as he adds, we can never succeed in realizing such a world in fact. But it is the triumph of this book that it -not only defines its ideal reality in poetry, but reinforces our aspiration, hopeless though it may be, to realize something at least of its grace
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