126
PARTISAN REVIEW
familiar good old sort, in terms of us and now;
The Drunken Fisherman
is
as interesting and strange a piece of "religious" writing as any since
The Castle.
A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard
to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are
born, not made.
Mr. Lowell is in a certain sense a poet's poet: properly to admire
his command of those three horses you need to have tried to ride three
horses yourself. Many of his phrases are memorable in that wonderful
and unfashionable way in which some of Empson's are.
When the ruine£l farmer beat out Abel's brains,
Our Father laid great cities on his soul.
A man who can begin a poem like that can do anything. (In this
case, alas, he can tum the poem into
Onward, Christian Soldiers.)
At his
best Mr. Lowell is a serious, objective and extraordinarily accomplished
poet. He is a promising poet in this specific sense: some of the best poems
of the next years ought to be written by him.
RANDALL JARRELL
NOTES FOR A REVIEW
HENRY JAMES: THE MAJOR PHASE.
By F.
0.
Matthiessen . Oxford Uni–
versity Press.
$2.50
1.
A scrupulous, discerning study of James's later
novels-The
Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove,
and
The Golden Bowl,
as well
as the two unfinished books-and a few of the later tales, partly from
the point of view of the recently available notebooks, in which the germs
of these works are to be found. Sensitive account of the manner in which
they foliated from their sometimes scanty origins to the full, fragrant,
richly-colored blooms they ended by being. Especially revealing on the
Wings,
which. F. 0. M. rightly; regards as the most deeply-felt and most
completely realized of the group.
2. Admirable discussion in Chap. III of J.'s use of symbols-as
elsewhere, too, of
h,is
imagery. J. not a
symboliste
in strict sense, certainly
not in the sense of French and other contemporary poetry, if only, as
F. 0. M. says, for his indifference to music-and, one might add, his
innocence of any systematic transcendental metaphysics; nor, either, in
the sense of such writers as Mann, Kafka, Joyce and Eliot. The symbol
not for him the thing-in-itself, the very substance of the fable, but some–
thing reached "with the final development of his theme," to give con–
cretion and beauty to his thought; its consummation, not its egg.
3. Importance of the book as another and very cogent answer to
Brooks' and Farrington's criticism, which naturally is not defensible in its
familiar, unmodulated form. Maintains, unanswerably, that only in this
later phase did J.'s art attain its truest, most idiosyncratic perfection, and
