BOO KS
431
ANGELS AND DEMONS
THE FORLORN DEMON: DIDACTIC AND CRITICAL ESSAYS. By Allen
Tote. Regnery. $3 .00.
Mr. Tate's latest book, a little volume of only 176 pages
called
The Forlorn Demon,
might be deceptively described as a collection
of eight disconnected literary
essays-deceptively,
because the essays
are not really disconnected at all. Deep down, they possess a unity that
is rare in any book, however deliberately it may be molded to a single
plan and purpose.
The Forlon Demon
impresses me as one of the most
distinguished American books of criticism that has appeared in a long
time-distinguished, indeed, among Mr. Tate's own books. With this
general acknowledgement I may perhaps add without impertinence that
I wish this unity I find so rare were not quite so deep down. The book,
if one does full justice to it, is more difficult than it deserves to be. It
even seems to me that the essays might have been arranged in a more
clarifying sequence than the one in which Mr. Tate has chosen to print
them, for it must be remembered that the essays portray a developing
idea. One appreciates Mr. Tate's difficulty. A real grapple with mean–
ing cannot be a slick performance; and it is true that the most over–
whelming problems (both in and out of art) are the ones whose ap–
proaches are most shadowy. Even so, I wish Mr. Tate had chosen to be
a little less oblique. But these very minor words of dissent are the last
I shall have to deliver. The rest is admiration and discussion--eX'egesis
would be the wrong word, for if Mr. Tate is a little oblique, he is not
obscure.
The nature of the unity in
The Forlorn Demon
is crucially hinted
at in a footnote on page 67 in which Mr. Tate refers to Jacques Mar–
itain's
The Dream of Descartes
and generously acknowledges: "My debt
to Mr. Maritain is so great that I hardly know how to acknowledge it."
For anyone not as philosophically obtuse as the present reviewer the
footnote would probably be an irrelevance-there are enough indications
in the earlier pages anyway. But it helps one get one's bearings. Other
critics have talked of the dissociation of sensibility that has parceled
the person out in little packages since the seventeenth century, and have
meant by it first one thing and then another-and sometimes perhaps
not very much. Sometimes it seems to mean little more than that our own
age has achieved a brilliantly kinaesthetic sense of falling apart. In this
respect it is rather like Humpty Dumpty; and like him also, all the
