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are the same. In varying ways the alliance of poetry and religion has
been accepted among our literary critics as unquestioningly as Darwin–
ism, Marxism, or Freudianism ever were. It has been sanctioned by the
theories of Frazer, Lord Raglan, and J ane Harrison, according to whom
myth and poetry originate in the ritual of the dying god. The ideas of
Cassirer, Mrs. Langer, and Jung have widened the scope of mythic
studies but have done nothing to shake the central dogma that allies
poetry with religion. Yet empirical observation in anthropology, psy–
chology, and aesthetics shows that poetry is allied both by nature and
historically more closely with magic and myth than with religion.
Magic is a kind of proto-science, and it is pragmatically akin to myth,
a kind of poetry. So much, and more, an empirical anthropology, as
opposed to the merely antiquarian thcorizing of writers like Frazer,
shows.
I have momentarily gone beyond the limits of Miss Nott's book
in order to give some particularity to her general propositions about the
relation of poetry, myth, and science to religion. As she eloquently tells
us, it is the nature of religion to harden into dogma and authority. It is
in the nature of poetry and science to respond to and explore exper–
ience, to have "an instinct for a living hypothesis," to make "verifiable
apperceptions" (though in different ways), to "hover" at the point of
man's biological fate, "between the impulse to creation and the impulse
to destruction." The interest of the scientist and the poet is always to
cure "the hypostatic disease to which all uses and all kinds of language
are liable" ; and "in the perversion of language . . . priest and poli–
tician are not very different from one another," for it is they who have
the most immediate reasons to "fear meaning." In fact it is perennially
true that "the scientist must protect the poet from the priests and the
poet must protect the scientist from the politicians." This formulation
states the whole tendency of the liberal, humanist tradition and places,
not science and religion, but science and poetry at the polar centers of
society, as, in the last century, writers as different as Arnold and Whit–
man did.
In much of her book Miss Nott is painstakingly concerned to un–
derstand how so great a literary critic as
T.
S. Eliot can have rested
content with a presentation of theological ideas so random and cryptic
as his has been. "He does not instruct or inculcate," observes Miss Nott,
"he only manifests himself with baffling discontinuity." He does not
argue his theology but tends vaguely to allude "to a whole corpus of
ecclesiastical learning." He does not explain what dogmas are necessary
