Doing the Impossible
English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Cen- tury. By Bonamy Dobrde. (O.U.P., 42s.) PROFESSOR DOBRgE deserves our heartfelt sym- pathy. Surely there must be something wrong with a conception (or lack of a conception) of literary history which forces an excellent writer to spend himself on the higher hackwork. 'To attempt to present more than this vulgarised account of Berkeley's philosophy would be outside the scope of this book.' Quite so, but Berkeley comes into the period and has to be `treated'; although Pro- fessor Dobrde must know very well that no one with any vital interest in Berkeley could want this treatment; it will be read (if at all) by examina- tion candidates in English intent on the external acquisition of 'background.' And that is the trouble with the whole thing. Professor Dobrde has been forced to write about authors whom he clearly wouldn't have chosen to write about, just because they come within his period. Of course, there are good remarks and excellent passages. How could it be otherwise, when a clever and erudite man has written it? Out of many I might cite, there is this on Swift's attitude to the human body : 'What is abnormal about this attitude is not its rarity, but its intensity; the intensity itself is the abnormality, as it is in much that Swift
wrote.' There is something to think about here; it is a critical remark. But the proper place for it is a critical essay. Professor Dobrde's best things —they are chiefly to be found in his studies of Swift, Defoe and Pope—lose by their context.
Thus, consider its treatment of the minor authors—not the interesting oddities, but the representative, run-of-the-mill figures who swell the bibliographies. Professor Dobrde seems to think that our reason for wanting to read about them is just to get a general 'sense of the period.' The result is that his own treatment of many of them has no point, and we cannot feel that he himself thinks it has either. The only way to make these writers interesting is to have another reason for writing about them over and above their mere date. Even intrinsically un- interesting material can be made interesting in this way. An Eliot can get us interested in lesser Elizabethan dramatists because he is interested in them, because he writes about them from choice. Professor Dobree, on the other hand, seems often not to have got clear in his own mind what he was doing. Why all those pages on Thomson (of The Seasons)? It is not because he thinks Thomson a great or even a very considerable poet. He has lapsed here into writing a history of taste; and as he has no special critical point of view of his own, it is a very dull one.
Surely it is about time someone spoke up about this—if it is only to save other writers from the fate of Professor Dobrde. Twenty years' hard for him, disappointment and frustration for us—is this to be the only reward of 'literary history'? There is a use for handbooks. There is a use for the history of ideas, or of changes in taste. And the good critical essay will never be superseded. But a jumble of all three is utterly unsatisfactory. No one is qualified to cover all the subjects Pro- fessor Dobrde has to deal with, and no one should be compelled to pretend to.
W. W. ROBSON
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