Reviews and Comment

Criticism and MedievaI Poetry. By A. C. Spearing. Edward Arnold. 21s. There are many adjustments to be made when the modern critic and reader

come into contact with medieval poetry: on top of the linguistic difficulty, they have to face some considerable literary and historical problems which are not merely the result of the passage of the centuries. Chief among these are notions of composition, purpose and response which are a t times fundamentally different from those which Renaissance and post-Renaissance literary thought have made us assimilate. It is help in adjusting modem critical perceptions and preconcep tions to the demands of an unfamiliar theory and practice of poetry that we expect from a book of this title.

Mr. Spearing discusses, and attempts to resolve in the course of analysis, two main confrontations of medieval and modem. A particular type of modern criticism-‘practical criticism’-is offered, and its operation demonstrated in the analysis of a poetry which presents the special problem of difluseness. Second, he explores the relation between practical criticism and medieval theories of composition: what use should the ‘close reader’, who is concerned with the local stylistic detail of a text, make of the information we have about (for example) the rhetorical teachings which medieval authors followed in framing their styles?

Diffuseness in medieval poetry is a product of both the tradition of oral delivery and the teachings of the artespoeticae. As for the first, it is just a case of writing a poem for an audience which has no opportunity to ‘reread‘ passages not understood. (Mr. Spearing also touches on another feature of oral poetry- its reliance on formulaic modes of expression-which has been investigated for Homeric and Old English poetry and is just beginning to be noticed in Middle English.) And the rhetorical manuals fostered diffuseness through their insistence on amplificatio. Diffuseness and conciseness, and the critical techniques for dealing with them, are illustrated by nice analyses of a passage from The Owl and the Nightingale and of Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid. The opposition between those two styles is a useful idea, and in this book is demonstrated to be productive in analysis: but it would be dangerous to erect the diffuse-concise scale as a yardstick for all medieval poetry and for any critical purpose.

‘One of the aims of the present book will be to see how far the technique of close reading can be of service in a critical approach to medieval literature’ (pp. 5-6). Close reading (it is interesting that this label is preferred to ‘practical criticism’) is defined and illustrated in the first chapter. ‘A minute scrutiny of the verbal detail of works of literature. . . This approach to literature is based on the assumption, whether or not this is stated, that the distinctive qualities of a complete literary work will be present and detectable locally in its verbal detail, so that this detail can be used to support more general statements about the work‘ (p. 1). Examples from Leavis, Empson and Cleanth Brooks are given, and then Mr. Spearing offers a samplc analysis of an extract from Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess. Now close reading is certainly desirable, whether or not the critic believes he can generalise on the basis of its findings. But it can involve many things, from minute scrutiny by a reader using little more than his own critical perception to analysis by a reader applying to the details of the text all the contextual help he can muster. The author moves from the ‘pure’ approach (e.g., in his study of part of The Book of the Duchess) to a reading which utilises the aid afforded by medieval ‘literary theory’ (as in Ch. 4, ‘The Art of Preaching and Piers Plowman’). The opening chapter may lead us to expect ‘pure’ practical

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criticism, but in fact the author is sensibly eclectic, accepting or rejecting external guidance where advisable. This is just as well, because what I have dubbed ‘pure’ practical criticism produces results which, though attractive, are by nature often disputable: and this fact is illustrated by Mr. Spearing’s treatment of The Book of the Duchess:

the sudden flurry of action as the Dreamer tries to catch the puppy but has to chase after it is expressed through the breathless short sentences connected with and‘s:

I wolde have kaught hyt, and anoon Hyt fledde, and was fro me goon; And I hym folwed, and hyt forth wente . . . (395) . . . the texture of sound is thickened in a way which suggests the richness and

lushness of the forest without the use of any detailed description: Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete, With f’lourea fele, faire under fete. (399)

(P. 13) The attacker need only search for short clauses connected by and in a context where ‘breathless’ is inappropriate; or f-alliteration which does not ‘thicken’. But this sort of attack gets us nowhere. More objectionable is the use to which ‘breathless’ and ‘thickened’ are put. They imply a ‘sound-and-sense’ correspon- dence in a dishonest way: they are intended to suggest the critic’s feeling of the effect of the passage, but pretend to be descriptive terms applied to the linguistic means by which the effect is obtained: ‘breathless short sentences’, ‘texture of sound is thickened’. The means and the effect must be separated, and the close reader must use factually descriptive terms for the linguistic means. A similarly disputable analysis occurs on p. 27.

In fact, this type of critical analysis is not the only sort used, despite chapter 1 : only 2 ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ relies much on ‘pure’ close reading as a stylistic criticism and as a means of providing the basis for interpretation. Ch. 3 ‘The Art of Poetry’ describes the medieval manuals of rhetoric, opens the question of their usefulness to the modern critic, describes the rhetorical features of a passage from The Owland the Nightingale, and concludes:

What an acquaintance with the medieval ars poetica can do for us is to arouse a general attentiveness to the patternings of sound and syntax. It can sharpen the ‘auditory imagination’ and make us more aware of the elaborate echoing that goes on inside much medieval verse. But for the use, beyond the merely decorative, to which these intricacies of sound are put, we shall have to resort as usual to our own critical judgment. (p. 66)

The final three chapters (4 ‘The Art of Preaching and Piers Plowman’, 5 ‘Chaucer as Novelist’ and 6 ‘Conciseness and The Testament of Cremeid’) explore further the uses of various sorts of medieval information to the close reader: the arspraedtcandi, medieval theories of dreams, and a taste for brevity for which there is some evidence in the late Middle Ages.

‘Criticism and Medieval Poetry’ is perhaps an ambitious title, and the stress on close reading at the outset is a little misleading. This book is, in fact, a series of studies in some great medieval poems. The studies (two of which have been published before) are illuminating; I am sure that part of their success comes from the author’s close reading. But we do not get, as we are led to expect, a consistent application of Practical Criticism to the texts. In the course of these studies Mr. Spearing imparts a good deal of useful information about the critical context of medieval poetry, and makes the reader conscious of the modern critic’s problems in deciding how to use this information. Close reading, backed up with whatever extra-textual information seems relevant, certainly helps ; but ‘we shall have to resort as usual to our own critical judgment’.

ROGER FOWLER 199

Bibliography of’ American Literature, Volume 4: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Joseph Holt Zngraham. Compiled for the Bibliographical Society of America by Jacob Blanck. Yale University Press, €7 4s. The scope of this Bibliography was declared in the first volume; the series is

devoted to writers whose work “constitutes the structure of American literatun for the past one hundred and fifty years”, and so it covers work from the time of the Revolution. At the latter end coverage is, unfortunately, limited in that no authors who died after the end of 1930 are treated-and this in fact cuts out a very sizeable section of American literature, though it does avoid much contro- versy about selection. Volume 4 advances the project into the ninth letter of the alphabet, entry being by author. Since there appear to be no controversial omissions, the most useful service a review like this can perform is simply to list the authors treated. In addition to the two names mentioned in the title, the subjects here are: John Hay, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Lafcadio Hearn, Henry William Herbert, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Abraham Hillhouse, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Josiah Gilbert Holland, Mary J. Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William H. C. Homer, Emerson Hough, Richard Hovey, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean Howells and James G. Huneker. The coverage is, as usual, of the fullest; there are in fact 2,524 distinct entries. British editions are (as usual) listed, and there is, again as usual, much clarification of disputed issues-such as the variation in the fust and second editions of The Scarkt Letter. In addition to the numbered entries all repeated publications (e.g., in the case of Hawthorne, his English and American notebooks edited by Randall Stewart) are given. The usefulness of the project does not need to be underlined.

MALCOLM BRADBURY

Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill

EDWARD ALEXANDER Assistant Professor of English, University of Washington

‘An exemplary book. Mr. Alexander has certainly added his own bright light to the whole field of Victorian Studies. He does not force his comparisons or make his contrasts over- neat. The book is not simply an interesting historical study. Nearly all the problems which exercised Mill’s mind and tormented the mind of Arnold are still unsolved and still in urgent need of solution’-PHrLw TOYNBEE, Observer 45s

Routledge & Kegan Paul 200