S94
~ARTISAN
IUVIEW
temporary cntICIsm. Not the sort of man to let
th~
failings of his su–
periors go unnoticed, Mr. Elton has prowled high and low, with an
almost malicious energy, in the work of our best critics. And he has
done his job with the precisely proper grimace of dead-pan somberness:
at one stroke he shows himself a gifted comic, the Buster Keaton of
contemporary criticism.
Mr. Elton has arranged his glossary in alphabetical order, from
action, symbolic
to
wit.
There are also frequent cross-references, such
as
(d.
paraphMse, heresy of).
Some of the choice entries include:
den.–
sity, ontological; form, conventional
(defined by Kenneth Burke as "the
appeal to form as
form
. . . "
and for redundant clarification as the
"equivalent of 'categorical expectation''');
knowledge, qualitative
as
distinct from
knowledge, quantitative;
and
control, spiritual
(the happy
example for which is Yvor Winters' remark that Eliot's "rather limp
versification . . . is inseparable from the spiritual limpness one feels
behind the poems"). One of Mr. Elton's more memorable flights is
poetry, Platonic,
which ends with the high-spiritedness of a traffic jam:
"Ransom's
Platonic poetry
and Tate's
Platonic poetry, allegorical poetry,
and
poetry of the will,
thus contrast with Ransom's
metaphysical poetry
and Tate's
poetry of the imagination.
Richards has comparable terms,
poetry of exclusion
for the former type and
poetry of synthesis, q.v.,
for the latter." Coming as it does like a sudden chime of lucidity,
(Cq.v."
somewhat spoils this passage, and Mr. Elton might consider its
future omission-but one should not cavil over details.
Of course, not all the entries are of equal effectiveness. Since he
has chosen to mimic the very weightiness of his victims, Mr. Elton has
been forced to include a large number of entries, some of which are of
genuine interest, as for example,
belief, problem of.
Here his satiric gifts
seem to desert him somewhat and one uneasily suspects that he has
lapsed into comparative seriousness; but even this entry is redeemed at
its conclusion by a magnificent quotation from Eliseo Vivas, "Freedom
from moral preoccupations . . . is very unstable and cannot be long
lasting in the normal human being."
By far the most delicious entries are the
fallacies
and
heresies,
of
which I count, respectively, five and three.
Affective fallacy
shoW!! Mr.
Elton at his best: in one brief paragraph he dismisses as "examples
of the affective fallacy ... Plato's feeding and watering of the passions,
Aristotle's counter-theory of catharsis and the Longinian 'transport' of
the audience.... " This may seem a bit too broad, mere burlesque-–
but in the context it is entirely justified.
Coupled with
affective fallacy
is
intentional fallacy,
the first being
