BOOKS
THE NEW MINERVA, OR LOST GROUND REGAINED
TH E EMPE ROR'S CLOTHES. By Kath leen Nott. Indi ana University Press.
$4.00.
This book is a critique of the theological "orthodoxy" of
T. S. Eliot and of lesser writers such as T. E. Hulme, Basil Willey, C.
S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Graham Greene; it is also an inquiry into
the general relation of poetry, religion, and science. Miss Nott is an
English novelist and poet, and one gathers that her book has made
a stir in England. It probably won't make a stir here, the temper of the
times being what it is. There appears to be little taste in this country
for polemical writing, a t least of the radical, empirical sort.
One may even fear that the words of Philip Toynbee which the
publisher is using to advertise the book will scare off more readers than
they will attract ; for Mr. Toynbee says (accmatc1y) that this is "a
witty, hard hitting, and deeply serious book, a rare example in our
time of vigorous polemic." The blurb about a different book on the
back of the dust jacket of
Th e Emperor's Clothes
will probably appeal
to most readers more strongly than Mr. Toynbee's words because, in
speaking of Philip Wheelwright's
The Burning Fountain: A Study in
the Language of Symbolism,
it implies that Mr. Wheelwright (whether
truly or not I don't know-I do know that Mr. W. is a fine scholar)
lumps together in common cause religion and poetry, and wants to save
them from the onslaughts of the scientific mind. We live in a period
when books that make us think of burning fountains and the la nguage
of symbolism apparently cause that surge of excitement which used to
be aroused by subtitles such as Miss Nott's:
An Attack on the Dogmatic
Orthodoxy of T .
S.
Eliot,
et al. Had she wished to entice the major
segment of the literary mind M iss Nott might have done better to call
her book something like
The Tr embling Tripod, The Bleeding Lance,
or possibly
Buckets of Blood: A Study in Literary I conography.
But
as she herself observes in another connection, "there is no bad time like
the present." And I must say that, reading her brilliant book, I began
to think that the future might brighten and that one's lost hopes of
a liberal and polemical criticism might be revived.
