558
PARTISAN REVIEW
to which he somehow felt he belonged by virtue of sensibility and in–
tellect. The difference between Shakespeare and most other poets was
that he kept all this tension under his poetic hat-with great advantage:
it was a continual feedback into his developing dramatic poetry.
Both Shakespeare and Donne were supremely aware of the dialectic
of the life around them. And Mr. Cruttwell is profoundly correct in
directing our minds to the essentially and completely dramatic nature of
Donne's poetry and
~o
to the fact that lateness of publication makes
us forget that he was an Elizabethan. Where 1 think Mr. Cruttwell
is
wrong
is
in time-pointing this dialectic as sharply as he has done.
Shakespeare and Donne were aware of it, because they were supremely
and naturally poetic, not because they stood on an Elizabethan peak, half–
titillating and half-torturing themselves with thoughts of the approach–
ing tumble into Civil War, Puritanism, rationalism, science and de–
mocracy: not because their most profound observation was of a last
union between civil forms and ecclesiastical ideology which would never
be repeated. This
is
Mr. Cruttwell's explanation of the "Shakespearean
moment" and its uniqueness. (I admit that he makes a better case for
it with Donne.)
He does not claim that Shakespeare was an orthodox Christian but
his
theory of the Shakespearean moment depends on classing Shakespeare
with Donne and other poets who appear to be standing on this Eliza–
bethan watershed, when there was still a complete and all-pervading
medieval unity of soul and body; spiritual authority and the body poli–
tic; Church and State; "precarious, soon to be lost, but alive for all
that." Awareness of the coming clash, the imminent chaos, "its near–
ness but its avoidance, gives the poetry its force." And further, this
type of dialectic awareness, according to Mr. Cruttwell, provides the only
true tragic art.
For Mr. Cruttwell, the tragic sense is essentially Christian, which
means that the dramatist is without illusions on the worldly level about
the behavior and fates of men, but believes that these fates are re–
deemed on another level. "For Christians, the terms on which the tragic
sense can be kept are original sin ... and redemption." But clearly he
does not think that non-Christians can have it on their own terms.
The poetry of the Shakespearean moment then, sprang from a
"deep underlying Christian Toryism"--conservative and orthodox. (Does
the grinding noise begin to rise over the auditory threshold?) And the
develC1pment of the progressive and optimistic mentality, represented
both by Puritans and Rationalists, destroys the tragic sense, that dramatic
tension which depends on the very fact that the acts and moral conflicts
