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152 France, was meant to follow, and a few chapters which never did get serialized with the rest of the fragment in Macmillan's Magazine are at the Houghton; the last novel, set at the end of the eighteenth century, in England (pp. 65, 66), was never begun, although his unfinished imaginary portrait, "An English Poet," could conceivably be a sketch, or part of the opening chapter. Positive clues to help the critic interpret Pater are unnaturally rare. We see how "modern" Pater could be on the question of teaching English literature at Oxford seven years before it was actually initiated, in a letter sent to the Pall Mall Gazette (1886), but his reservations are so complex that his stand is somehow vitiated. He does reveal, nevertheless, one quite significant fact: how Important religion was to him (pp. 52, 58-59, 64-65). He makes Sharp understand, for instance, how Marlus should be interpreted less as a defense of epicureanism than as an attempt to depict a "religious phase possible for the modern mind" (Italics added), and explains to Mary Ward how religion is "one of the natural questions of the human mind." Careful readers of all of Pater's cerebral fiction will have to remember this when trying to explain his themes and his preoccupations. But as In the rest of the Letters. Pater gives us only hints and starts, shades and outllnes , little to work with except what in most cases we might have already expected. If nothing else, this volume dispels what little hope we had for further keys to this fascinating, enigmatic Victorian . St. John's University Robert M. Scotto 3. Decadent Poetry - An Introduction John M. Munro. The Decadent Poetry of the Eighteen-Nlnetles. Beirut, Lebanons American University of Beirut, 1970. 78Tp. $3.30. On examining a work which is as carefully argued as Munro*s The Decadent Poetry of the Eighteen-Nlnetles. one should probably bear in mind T. H. Huxley's charge that reviewers tend to draw their own materials from the book under consideration, "as the Abyssinian is said to provide himself with steaks from the ox which carries him." Munro's book is a comprehensive essay on the sources, attitudes, and significance of English Decadent poetry in the socalled "yellow nineties." As such, the book offers an informed historical perspective for that phenomenon, but has little time for sustained literary analysis. Munro himself, though, suggests the reason for this apparent oversight when he advises, in his Foreword, that his account "was originally intended as an introduction to a much larger work, a collection of essays by various scholars on the Decadent poets of the 1890s, followed by a representative selection of their verse." This endeavor, it seems, became a victim of today's increasingly lean budgets, and hence 153 Munro presents his own short study of Nineties poets. Munro begins with a qualified discussion of the problem of definition . "In general terms," he submits, "we may say that the English Decadence, as defined by contemporaries, was concerned with the exploration of abnormal psychology; it professed to be concerned with Beauty, but with a beauty so bizarre and unconventional that one might feel more Justified in calling it ugliness; it was self-conscious to the point of artificiality; it was generally at odds with the prevailing notions of decency and morality ; it was somewhat precious and formal in style, sometimes betraying more concern with expression than subject matter; it was contemptuous of popular movements and attitudes; and it was imbued with a tone of lassitude and regret." Munro does not mention , but appears to have in mind, the four characteristics of the Decadence cited by Holbrook Jackson in his The Eighteen Nineties; perversity, artificiality, egoism and curiosity. Munro would advise some caution in speaking of a "Decadent Movement " and in "ascribing to it precisely determined characteristics ." Munro goes on to establish the relationship between Decadent literature and the late Victorian age. Despite material prosperity , the artists were revolted by and thus revolted against Arnold's "iron age." Decadent excess and oddity were a conscious attempt to shock the middle classes out of smug complacency. Too, they were efforts to assert the validity...

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