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132 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY of relief in the future, but despite bias it can be said that this is the most hopeful book in the field of economics which has appeared in the Western World. DE QUJNCEY AS A CRITIC* M. M. KIRKWOOD To those not familiar with the publications of the University of Michigan Press, this volume by the late Dr Sigmund Proctor may furnish an excellent introduction. It is marked by the most conscientious scholarship, both in the body of the work and in _the appendix and notes added by Professors C. D. Thorpe and Paul Mueschke after the author's death. The appendix gives a supplementary survey of the most recent scholarship on De Quincey. The au.thor's original aim was to render a more complete analysis than earlier scholars had attempted of De Quincey's critical ideas, spread as they were over nine of the volumes of the Collected Writings and in passages in the Posthumous Works. This aim was sharpened as the examination proceeded by the discovery of an unresolved conflict in De Quincey's theory. Where Miss Darbishire and others treated him as a more or less consistent romantic, resting on his famous characterization of the literature of power and on the view attributed to him that substance and form in .literature are inseparable, J. H. Fowler deprecated and largely dismissed his attempts at aesthetic theory while exalting his achievements in particular criticism. Dr Proctor maintains that Miss Darbishire over-simplifies and that Fowler under-estimates, while the truth is that De Quincey is a really significant figure in the history of western criticism who just fell short of a consistent and satisfying aesthetic. Inconsistency, paradox and anomaly are attributed to De Quincey on one main ground, that in various papers he treats·literature as a fine art, appealing to and justified by the human desire for pleasure, while in others (those better known and more widely used by the critics) he maintains that power is its essence. Dr Proctor considers that it needed but a step to combine these two conceptions, a step which De Quincey never took. As a professional critic he saw literature as a kind of mind-play (this is his main position in the "Rhetoric")-while in his more serious pronounce- *Thomas De ~uincey's Theory of Liurature, by SIGMUND K. PROCTOR. Ann Arbor, The Urliversity of Michigan Press, 1943, $3.50. REVIEWS 133 ments he described it variously as manifesting either "the dark power of nature which is at the root of all things" or "the infinity of the world within me." The virtue of Dr Proctor's elaborate documentation is that it makes clear how close De Quincey was to a truly organic view. Mind-play and pleasure are not alien to complete humanity, but are rather parts of it; and nothing less than complete humanity lies at the root of great creation in any art. According to the argument , De Quincey was prevented from realizing this by the split in his own consciousness between thought and feeling, a split induced by the study of Kant when a youth of twenty years and never healed. De Quincey is then a Kant-ridden modern who, finding the transcendental philosophy ''a philosophy of destruction" (his own words), and unable to accept honestly any transmutation of rational metaphysic such as Coleridge developed, recoiled upon the feelings as a basis for belief. Only so could he keep the Christian beliefs and attitudes which were fundamental to him, beliefs and attitudes which are adopted by "the understanding heart" (his phrase) and which are similar, in their common source of experience, to the intuitions of the sublime which form the stuff of literature. In this general position, De Quincey may be related to John Henry Newman, who described the "illative sense" as alone capable of intuiting reality. Dr Proctor has a strong sympathy, it is apparent, with the modem man confronted by the dilemma between faith and knowledge, and thinks De Quincey typical in his ultimate emphasis. In placing his subject finally, our author puts him in the line of the psychological critics, with a strong relation of debt to...

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