Shelley’s Major Poems: The Fabric of a Vision by Carlos Baker

SHORTER NOTICES 441 are overworked, for example "sensuous" which appears four times on one page within a space of sixteen lines. Professor Munsterberg's treatment of T'ang and Sung painting is more satisfactory than is his handling of the earlier periods. But how can anyone dismiss all creative art in China during the past two hundred years with just six lines: "The last Chinese reign which was artistically productive was that of Ch'ien lung (1736-1795), for during his rule architecture, painting and the minor arts flourished. However, the products of this age lacked both originality and vigor, and with the nineteenth century, the great art of China came to an end." L. C. WALMSLEY Shelley's Major Poems: The Fabric of a Vision. By CARLOS BAKER. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders and Company Limited]. 1948. Pp. xii, 307. $6.25. Shelley has suffered more than any other English romantic poet from the anti-romantic reaction which began during the First World War. Matthew Arnold, long before that, designated him "a beautiful but ineffectua! angel," a curiously un-Arnoldian judgment in which the reservation makes beauty and goodness seem of no rea! value. In the last generation not many writers have insisted that he was notably beautiful or angelic. Neo-humanists, neo-medievalists, neo-royalists, and neo-authoritarians generally have censured or merely ignored this poet who inherited the anti-authoritarian ideas of the Enlightenment and the unrealized hopes of the French Revolution and envisaged a future when liberty, equality, and fraternity would be more fully realized than ever before. In the twenties, Irving Babbitt was demonstrating that the fonnerly admired romantic period was actually the time of the Fall of Man, that Rousseau was Satan, the Arch-Enemy, and that Shelley was in fact an angel of sorts, rather like Beelzebub or Belia! who also spoke "words clothed in reason's garb." In the thirties, T. S. Eliot, after he became "a classicist, a royalist, and an Anglo-Catholic," roundly denounced Shelley who was none of these -a judgment which has often been cited respectfully, though it has also stimulated some notable writing in his defence. Shelley's Major Poems: The Fabric of a Vision, by Professor Carlos Baker, is an excellent example of a more recent, and welcome, kind of writing about Shelley. It is a systematic and critical study of the longer poems, from Queen Mab, composed when he was twenty years of age, to The Triumph of Life which was left unfinished at his 442 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY death ten years later-and it is admirably free from the party-line pronouncements of the previous generation. Mr. Baker not only examines the major poems separately but he traces through them the developing thought and art of a poet who was remarkably learned for his years and whose major interests included philosophy, psychology , political theory, public affairs, physical science, and imaginative literature in half a dozen languages, ancient and modern. There is perhaps nothing in the general argument of the book (as distinguished from the interpretation of individual poems) which will strike the informed reader as entirely new, but he may well be impressed by the thoroughness and persuasiveness of the study, and he may often wonder why just this kind of book was not written long ago. I cannot think of another book that so well supplements Newman White's monumental biography. Two minor reservations-the chapter on Epipsychidion is less satisfactory than others because of the author's slightly touchy attitude toward the "literalists" who think that the poem was addressed to Emilia Viviani quite as much as to "one more metaphor of the Shelleyan epipsyche." Although he cites Dante's observations on the four ways of reading the Convito, Mr. Baker gives the impression that the transcendental interpretation is the only one that matters in Shelley's poem. Similarly, the tangled problem of the personal and literary sources of Julian and M addalo seems to be oversimplified. Incidentally, Shelley's fictional name surely does not derive from the Julian Alps (p. 126), but from Julian the Apostate. J. R. MACGILLIVRAY BOOKS RECEIVED ALBRECHT~ WILLIAM...