Shelley in the Dock -Defence of Shelley, and other Essays.
By Herbert Read. (Heinemann. 10s. 6d.) SHELLEY has many qualities which commend him to the lazy reader : as Bagehot pointed out, " he loved attenuated ideas and abstracted excitement " ; and as Keats hinted, he did not bother to " load every rift with are." lie gives the reader a pleasant feeling of mor..1 uplift without compelling him to apply the general principle to any special case. Consequently, the undiscriminating worship of Shelley fosters a notion that poetry is something ethereal and vague. It is therefore not surprising that a poet as precise and concrete in his thoughts as Mr. Eliot should write disparagingly of the uncritical Shelley-cult. This disparagement has led Mr. Read to make a defence of Shelley which shows an asperity unusual in that urbane and serious critic. It should be said at once that Mr. li.6ttl's trivial irritation seldom. reappears to _mar the other essays in this hook, all of .whkh send the reader back to the works discussed with a new and lively interest.
Mr. Head's defence of Shelley is based-on an exposition of :itelley's personality in terms of a theory of Dr. Trigant Burrow, but it is hardly likely to he convincing to those who, like Mr. Eliot, find that personality repugnant, and it. is likely to rile the indiscriminate admirers rather more than the original disparagement. For anyone who cares to read them, there are already the critical essays: of Browning and Swinburne In take the sting out of Mr. Eliot's attack. To read Shelley as an unsuccessful objective. Aristotelian poet is to misconceive his Vinci and function. " What .Shelley tries to do he does ; and he does not try to do the some thing as Keats," wrote Swinburne. " This poem of the Euganean !fills is no piece of spiritual sculpture or painting after the life of natural things. . . It is a rhapsody of thought and feeling coloured by contact with- nature, but not born of the contact " ; and BrOwning had already written : " Not what Jaen sees, but what Cod sees—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand—it is toward these that he struggles."
All this, arta Shelley's own theory of criticism, can be trans- lated into the language of modern psyeholeu, and Mr. Read's essay is such a translation : " the only kind of criticism which is basic . . is ontogenetic crititisin, by which I mean Criticism which traces the origins of the work of art in the psychology of the individual and in the economic structure of society." Mr. Read exhibits Shelley as a, neurotic, and then justifies him in the words of Dr. Burrow : " If the neurotic regarded__ individually, or as the embodiment within himself of a societal ieSion, is an expreion of separatism and pathology, the neurotic = iewed organieally, or as the embodi- /tient within himself of the societal eonti tttttt My is no • less an ekpression of confluence and health. if; itt the first instance, ho is hintselt the disorder that is his own separatism and tHle0O- saougnetas, in the second he is the integration that is his own confluence and .consciousness."
Thus Shelley, not completely dissociated '" from his original organic unity . with his .mother'-' but intelleettiaW, mature, dyes not make his peace with society a,s it is, but expres.ses his own struggles towards objectivity in terms of' some-fidure unification of. autukind .through love. -This ontogenetic criticism ignores the fact that poetry is a verbal art ; when,• in passing, Mr. Read mentions that Shelley's poetry is essen- tially verbal and often has no visual equivalent, he does not- pause to point out that this peculiarity of Shelley's: poetry partly explains its small effect on Mr. Eliot; who looks- fur "elear Visual images in poetry.
• In discussing " ObScurity in Poetry " Mr. :Read. eomei nearer to grappling With the problems of words- and rhythm. It is clear that, in poetry, he most delights iu.that effect which Warton called " a nameless terrible grace, resulting from a mixture of ideas, and a confusion of imagery." The merit of language, contrasted with painting, as a median of art, is that it is partieularly suited to the production of this effect, which Dallas called " the weird." But " the weird " and its eomplement, " the comically fantastic," are not the only important aesthetic effects. There are also the -abstract; formal or geometrical, and. the narrative or representational elements. Mr-Head's discussion of abstract art, in his essays- on Picasso and on English art, might have been clarified if he had not asswned a simple antithesis of " abstract " and " representational."- The representational element does not include the weird, as Mr. Read himself has shown, and pure abstract art can never be ward, -as one sees when one tries to; imagine a comically-fantastic 'abstract painting. When he:. says that Picasso " found the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone were satisfactory objects. in themselves, and that out of such elements he could construct a design which conveyed all the purely aesthetic appeal in any painting," he is uninten-.
tionally exchiding the weird fromaestheties. Read's. essays on Patmore and Hopkins show that he intends no such restric-. tion, and his very charming essay on " Diderot's Love Letters shows that he appreciates; too, that elusive fourth element in art, the impression of a personality which emerges even when the artist is most detached and austere, and makes. the fullest use of the principle of aesthetic distance. The obtrusiveness of Shelley's personality, as well as the nature of that personality and the quality of his imagery, is probably responsible both for his popularity and his unpopularity.
MICHAEL ROBERTS.
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