Shorter Notices
Before the Romantics. An Anthology of the Enlightenment Chosen by Geoffrey Grigson. (Routledge. 10s. 6d.)
THE period from (roughly) the Restoration to the late mid-eighteenth century could hardly have been better served up for the casual student. After extraordinarily wide reading and always with a severe eye on the present, Mr. Grigson has put together passages of verse and prose in a most ingenious manner, drawing attention to their beauties by neat headings and illustrating all moods from Dr. Burnet's horrors of the Last Day to the rakishness of Rochester. Occasionally, perhaps, he has demanded too much ; nearly fourteen pages of Bishop Butler take some swallowing, and Elizabeth Rowe's shepherds jig along a very well-worn way. But on the whole these hundred or so years--rather under a cloud, as Mr. Grigson says, after Arnold's strictures ; but was it only Arnold who found some- thing lacking in Pope and Dryden?—could not have been made more varied and amusing. Though Mr. Grigson has included an astonishing number of writers, the giants—Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson—still remains giants. (But, apropos of Johnson, one wonders why Chesterfield has not been allowed a word.) Anecdote, abuse, wit, gossip, sermonising—the Enlightenment had them all in God's plenty. Only suddenly, after a prolonged immer- sion in this self-conscious common-sense world, one comes with a shock of surprise on a sentence from Bunyan or a verse from a Watts hymn, and then one knows one has been starving for some- thing all the time—the individual voice, the mystery as Mr. Grigson will have it. This period expressed everything admirably except the deeper levels of feeling. Mr. Grigson has brought it (even with its gong-like quality) astonishingly close to today.
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