Year: 1920
Type: article
Abstract: another 'minor,' as Mr Pierce calls them, are now realities where they used to be shadows.He has fixed not only nebulous personalities but nebulous ideas.A geographical basis for literary criticism may seem at first preposterous; it is, as a matter of fact, exceptionally sound.As it is used in this book, in many, though not in all chapters, it throws considerable light on literary relationships.But, while it is clearly shown for how much propinquity counts in many cases, especially at Stowey and Hampstead, a mortal blow is dealt to the moribund though still breathing notion of a 'Lake School.'Though Mr Pierce lays so much stress on environment rather than on 'the magic of poetry,' he has more than a few illuminating flashes.Of Wordsworth, after citing examples of admirers, he says, 'he and his poetry stand essentially alone.'He has a discriminating paragraph on the succession of influences felt by Shelley.There is exceptional originality in his comparison of Byron to the tiger of reality, and perhaps inspiration in the idea that the hostility of the Scotch reviewers to the 'Cockney School' may have had something in it of race antipathy.It is not race antipathy, for we are of one blood, but a certain insular conservatism, which makes some of us feel acute discomfort to learn that Gait lived 'at London,' which causes a sort of exhaustion at the frequent occurrence of 'molding' influences, and which gives rise to honest wonder as to the identity of one Robert Stevenson.But such carping is mere childishness.English students welcome always with interest, often with delight, all criticism of their literature from abroad, especially of late years from France, and now from America.Writers of both countries show an inexhaustible faculty for research which would shame many an English scholar.Mr Pierce's book, even without its list of sources and authorities, shows him to be no exception.And it may be noted that out of his vast mass of reading, he selects quotations, particularly prose quotations, with exceptional felicity.And though, as has been said, he disclaims any attempt at the highest flights of imaginative criticism and sedulously avoids the moral or sententious, yet he brings from the' Romantic' age one message for his own, revealing a side which he is at pains elsewhere sedulously to conceal: 'In the age of submarines and iron order the mysticism of Blake may prove a rock of refuge in a weary land.'
Source: The Modern Language Review
DOI: 10.2307/3714745
Authors: H. B. Charlton, Barrett H. Clark
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2328969475