ODDLY NAMED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 497, 31 December 1948, Page 14

ODDLY NAMED

THE ROMANTIC COMEDY, By D., G. James. Geoffrey Cumberlege: Oxford University Press.

T seems a little unfortunate that the publishers should have used the word "history" Ly recommending this oddlynamed book about the English romantic movement. To my mind it hasn’t a great deal to do with history, Mr. James’s view is that romanticism begins with Blake’s gospel. of Hell, traverses the Purgatory of Shelley and Keats, and arrives at Coleridge’s and Newman’s

gospel of Heaven; and in. the long and careful elaboration of * this theory Wordsworth receives comparatively little mention, while Byron is not mentioned at all so far as I can discover, except in a quotation from Newman. And there are other omissions-a_ remarkable one being that the .author makes no use of modern psychological discoveries and methods, a lack particularly to be regretted in the section dealing with Blake. Mr, James confesses that he has been puzzled and baffled (and I fear shocked, too) by certain passages in Blake’s poetry and prose, "Such passages reduce the reader to despair of fixing Blake into a clear frame of doctrine," he says. It depends on the doctrine, maybe. A man who could go for a walk to the end of the heath, and ask you to believe that he had touched the moon with his finger-well! ‘But there are tentative doctrines in the writings of Groddeck and Freud that might have helped quite a lot.

Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, it is plain that Mr. James has written from a Christian standpoint; and perhaps this is the reason for his being most at his .ease in dealing with Coleridge and Newman. His view of Newman as a romantic Catholic attracted to the Christianity of the saints, supports his theory that romanticism has finally worked itself out, since it is true that in more recent times interest has shifted to the Christianity of the theologians-though perhaps one should never exclude the ultra-romantic possibility that it may one day shift to the Christianity of Christ. I found the exposition of Coleridge’s Protestantism tedious, however. After all, Kierkegaard (whom Mr. James doesn’t mention), is fashionable these da but fashion apart, his statement that otestantism is nota principle for Christianity, but only a semedy at a given time and place, seems to have left very little more to be said.

Very generally speaking though, what makes one doubtful about the book as a whole is that the author doesn’t convince one that he is exceptionally sensitive to poetry as such, His study of Blake, Shelley and Keats is about men who were poets beyond all else. And perhaps one might fairly say the same of Coleridge. It is surely a mistake to be over-concerned with "a clear frame of doctrine." It is an important matter, no doubt, but one that tends to obtrude itself between Mr. James and his enjoyment of the "poetry." (The quote marks are his.) And perhaps it has something to do with the apparent slip that he has made in writing of Coleridge’s Christabel. He writes of "the embodiment, in Christabel herself, of the very essence of evil set over against the peffection and beauty of Geraldine." (The italics are mine.) I may be showing a lack of perception that marks me out as grossly incompetent to write this review-yet I have to say that, for me, the statement makes sense only if the two names are transposed.

Frank

Sargeson